Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Endosymbiosis and reductive evolution — how one organism comes to live inside another and depend on it, and how that ends — reductive genome evolution by drift, deletional bias or adaptive loss (including the Black Queen dependencies of free-living microbes), complementary loss across partners, nested symbioses and symbiont splitting and replacement, endosymbiotic gene transfer, protein import and host control of transmission, organellogenesis and organelle loss, and eukaryogenesis. The ecology of a partnership is ecology (ADR-055).
2 of 371 QUESTION documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| QUESTION-277 v5 | When formerly autonomous partners come to depend on one another, which of mutual dependence, reproductive cohesion, the distribution of essential functions across genomes, the host’s regulatory control and the alignment of selection does each route to dependence bring about, and which of them, alone or together, make the partnership a new evolutionary individual? | From the exchange of 2026-10-27 on the record’s coverage of reductive evolution and endosymbiosis. Dependence can come from selection for individual gene loss (LIT-1568), from drift in small symbiont populations (LIT-1573), from complementary loss across lineages (LIT-1565, LIT-1563) or from gene transfer and protein import (LIT-1557, LIT-1562). None of these is selection for the collective. Athreya et al. (LIT-1570) model dependence and cohesion as separate properties that evolve at different rates. An answer would say, route by route and on real systems, which properties each produces, and which of them a theory of individuality must require. All the works cited are filed unread. | Open |
| QUESTION-353 | Across real symbioses, does the partner with the larger and faster-growing population become obligate first more often than chance, and does the other partner’s dependence follow the balance of births and deaths inside the collective, as Athreya, Czuppon and Gokhale’s model predicts? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-1051, moved here when the twenty-fourth status review narrowed and promoted THEORY-1051 (ADR-065 §3). The model makes the prediction; whether real symbioses bear it out is this question. | Open |