From Linear Replication to Networked Verification: Two Strategies for Organizational Memory Preservation and Their Efficiency Logic

The longterm persistence of any organizational pattern faces a fundamental challenge: the inevitable accumulation of replication errors leads to the continuous degradation of organizational memory across generations. Grounded in the core insight of organizational ontology—that any “existence” is a dynamically maintained organizational pattern rather than a static independent entity—this paper establishes linear replication and networked verification as the two fundamental strategies for organizational memory preservation. It reveals a previously underappreciated crosslevel regularity: from the mass production of hydrogen atoms to nucleosynthesis inside stars, from gene replication to code iteration, from linguistic transmission to legal evolution, the organizational universe has invented only these two basic replication grammars. Linear replication hedges against errors through sheer quantity—effortless and efficient, but in the long run it falls into an irreversible decline known as Muller’s ratchet. Networked verification blocks error accumulation through crosscomparison of independent copies—it requires sustained verification costs but in exchange provides long‑term stability of organizational memory. Taking the “two‑fold cost of sex” paradox as a starting point, this paper integrates theoretical and empirical results from population genetics, nucleosynthesis theory, condensed matter physics, software engineering, cognitive science, and social network analysis. It systematically demonstrates how the mass production of hydrogen atoms and the nuclide verification by supernovae constitute classic cosmic‑scale cases of organizational memory preservation, how Git version control in the digital world independently replicates the full logic of networked verification in engineering form, and how the distinction between civil law and common law reflects the differential weighting of the two strategies at the social level. The study further reveals that verification mechanisms run through all levels of organizational memory systems—from hydrogen to uranium in the periodic table, from genetic blueprints to code repositories, from oral epics to legal institutions. And the sole judge throughout is the efficiency principle: to secure the longest persistence at the smallest cost.