From Chemistry to Heredity: A Systems-Level Pathway to Pre-Genetic Evolution

This paper develops a systems-level account of how persistent chemical organization can give rise to heredity. The Synechite framework describes chemical communities whose organization persists through molecular turnover, retains consequences of prior states, and influences the organization that follows. Through composition, catalytic interactions, spatial structure, material exchange and environmental modification, such systems can maintain compositional and organizational memory before hereditary information is encoded predominantly in molecular sequence. When persistent organization affects differential continuation across changing conditions, historical differences can be retained and incorporated into subsequent states, establishing a physical basis for pre-genetic heredity and cumulative chemical evolution. Sequence-bearing molecules can then become integrated into these organizations, with copying, sequence-dependent function and selection progressively establishing more precise and transferable forms of molecular inheritance. Genetic heredity therefore emerges as a further organization of an already historically continuous chemical process, rather than as the isolated appearance of a fully formed hereditary system. The framework also provides an experimental program for identifying the chemical conditions under which persistence, memory, transmission, variation and differential persistence become coupled, and for determining how different environmental regimes can support different stages of this development. This approach opens a route from experimentally accessible chemical organization to the reconstruction of the historical processes through which heredity arose, while allowing surviving features of modern biology to retain traces of deeper organizational history.