nucleation

TERM-084: descent, and which sense: provenance, lineage, common ancestry or causal descent

3 min read

Properties7
StatusActive
Version3
Tagsindividuation, social-ontology, translation
Linedistributed-agency
ComplementsTERM-008 — transport, TERM-071 — persistence, of an organization, and which sense: state, dynamical, historical, viable and reinstatable
Cited as “complements” byTERM-100 — provenance, of a capacity or an organization, and which sense: formation provenance (whose process produced it), maintenance provenance (whose process keeps it), or source provenance (what it was made from, the sense the descent term holds)
Cited as “uses” byCLAIM-002 — A text's identity across retellings is a family of relations, namely identity of the artifact, continuity of transmission and similarity of communicative function, which is why a distant retelling can be recognizably descended from an original it no longer resembles, CLAIM-191 — Restating an argument across memoryless sessions is iterated transport with only a weak channel back to the source: without anchors, restatements drift toward the collaborators' own framings rather than at random, and a code restores continuity of transmission, CLAIM-204 — A communicative kind's identity is grounded in its relational organization, for which competent participants' uptake is the standard; statistical methods recover aspects of it from restricted observations; translation transports it; and what persists is what the receivers can still recover, of which the analyst can certify the independently identifiable part, CLAIM-210 — Sharing a kind and being a rendering are different relations: kind-sharing is symmetric and says what is to be preserved, while fidelity belongs to a transport from a given source, so an utterance of the same kind made independently of the source shares its kind and has no fidelity to it, CLAIM-246 — Sharing a kind is symmetric and blind to which work is the source, so the October thesis cannot say a translation is of its original, against the line's own directed, graded fidelity and identity through descent, CLAIM-287 — What persists when a self persists through inactivity is the capacity to reinstate an organization, not its continuous running, and continuity of that kind can branch and merge, so it is not an identity relation, CLAIM-329 — A collective that replaces all its members persists, when it does, by causal transmission of the organization that produces it, not by resemblance: an organization of the same kind that arises independently is not its continuation, and a lapse in its coherence need not end it, CLAIM-417 — What the record explained by "self" in its dispositional, persisting, self-governing and integrated senses is better explained by organizational perspectives, with a perspective, its carriers, its lineage and its representations kept apart; the subject sense stays a separate question, and narrative, presented and modeled selves involve representations that may describe a perspective, attribute it to a bearer or construct an owner, none of them the perspective itself, CLAIM-420 — A historical figure's influence can persist in three separable ways, as a story about them, as a perspective transmitted from them, and as later organizations that descend from their activity, and causal descent is not perspectival inheritance: a movement founded to oppose someone can descend from them without continuing their perspective

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Definition

A claim that one thing descends from another says which of these it means.

  1. Provenance. One realization was made from another: a single transport (TERM-008) from a given source. Directed. It is the relation a fidelity profile is defined for (TERM-043), so the descendant has a fidelity to its source, high or low. CLAIM-210’s “T was made from S”, whose sentence was revised on 2026-10-27 to call this provenance; CLAIM-246’s objection, and CLAIM-204’s account of direction, which points to CLAIM-210’s answer.
  2. Lineage. Continuity of transmission across successive carriers: a retelling of a retelling, a fandom carried through a generation, an institution across its branches. Directed, and transitive along the chain. It is CLAIM-002’s “continuity of transmission” (“descent is not similarity”), TERM-071’s historical persistence, and what CLAIM-329 says persistence through total turnover consists in; CLAIM-191’s later entries that “reach the claim by descent, by its code”, and CLAIM-417’s “Historical descent”. CLAIM-287’s caution applies: it “is not automatically an equivalence relation”, since lineages can branch and merge.
  3. Common ancestry. Two realizations descend, each by lineage, from one ancestor, and neither from the other. Symmetric between the two. No transport runs between them, so neither has any fidelity to the other. CASE-054’s Crow and Hidatsa joking relations, from a parent tribe; the paragraph CLAIM-210 gained on 2026-10-27.
  4. Causal descent. The later thing exists because of the earlier one’s activity, with nothing of it passed on. Directed, with no fidelity and no continuation. CLAIM-420: “a movement founded to oppose someone can descend from them without continuing their perspective”, so “causal descent is not perspectival inheritance”. CLAIM-329’s note of 2026-10-26 gives the limiting case: every training checkpoint is causally descended from the last, so causal descent alone cannot tell continuation from replacement.

What separates them:

sensedirectedfidelitycontinuation
provenanceyesthe descendant to its sourceno
lineageyesopen: see belowthe candidate for persistence
common ancestrynonone between the pairno
causal descentyesnoneno

What it is not

  • Similarity. None of the four is resemblance, and resemblance is evidence for none of them without a route (CLAIM-002, CLAIM-329). Two realizations can share a kind with no descent at all (CLAIM-210’s I).
  • Kind-sharing. Kind-sharing is symmetric and carries no history (TERM-040); descent in senses 1, 2 and 4 is directed, and common ancestry is a fact about history that kind-sharing is not.
  • Identity. A lineage can continue an organization in one respect and not another, and several later collectives can each descend from one (CLAIM-328); numerical identity is a further question (QUESTION-118).
  • Descent in optimization. “Gradient descent” and the “common descent direction” of CLAIM-347, CLAIM-351 and CLAIM-366 are unrelated uses of the word.

What it leaves open

Whether a lineage is provenance composed along a chain, so that each branch has a fidelity relative to its ancestor. The record treats serial reproduction that way (CASE-068, CLAIM-056: local transport errors propagate through later reconstructions), and CASE-054 leaves it open for the reproduction of an institution, which is re-enacted rather than rendered from a token. If lineage is composed provenance, common ancestry gives each sibling a fidelity to the ancestor and still none to the other. ADR-056’s proposed kinds would class this term as a disambiguation.

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