Structural Intelligence as a Cross-Domain Operating Pattern: Field, Viability, Burden, Evolution, and Reorganization Across Psyche, Institutions, AI, Physics, and Biology

This paper develops a comparative grammar for asking how local forms persist, carry costs, alter their environments, and reorganize under changing conditions. The proposal is deliberately weaker than a universal cross-domain mechanism. Similar questions can travel across biology, institutions, psychology, AI-mediated systems, and selected physical models, but the causal answers remain domain-specific. Biology provides the strongest empirical neighbor because viability, regulation, reproduction, selection, ecological feedback, and transitions in individuality are established processes rather than analogies. Niche-construction research, ecological-scaffolding work, and research on major evolutionary transitions support a bounded sequence of environmental conditions, local organization, viability, changed selection conditions, and higher-level reorganization. They do not validate claims about psychological truth, institutional legitimacy, or artificial agency by analogy. The paper therefore separates a portable diagnostic question-set, domain-specific mechanisms, and stronger ontological claims requiring independent argument. Correction is treated with the same discipline: a disturbance is not automatically corrective, feedback is not automatically warranted, and reorganization is not automatically improvement. A strong cross-domain comparison must identify the target-domain evidence, the carrier of cost, the mechanism of steering, the response under recurrence, and what would make the analogy fail. The result preserves structural comparison while keeping mechanism, normativity, and human-specific concepts domain-bound.