The design
A4: “Construct two populations whose behavior is initially matched. Transfer among them different combinations of learned interpretive rules, specialist parameters, training histories, institutional rules, and shared memory. Then expose the populations to situations in which the transferred components disagree with their new environment.”
What is measured
Which transferred combination carries the source population’s characteristic responses into the new one, and for how long; which needs the old environment to keep being enacted; and which is reabsorbed.
What the outcomes would show, and what they would not
- What is transmitted. A4: the payoff is “a causal account of what is transmitted when a perspective persists across carriers”. That is CLAIM-329’s causal transmission, broken into its parts, and QUESTION-118 asked as an experiment.
- Interruptions apart. A transfer that keeps a disposition and loses the conditions to enact it separates CLAIM-421’s enactment interruption from its reproduction interruption.
- Not identity. The causal story it can give does not settle which population is the same as which.
- Its standing evidence. Jacobs and Campbell’s laboratory microculture (LIT-1423, not reached) is reported to show a norm surviving the replacement of everyone who set it (QUESTION-118); this design asks which parts of what survives did the work.