APS Box — Inheritance Is Not Information Transfer

In APS, inheritance is not fundamentally the transfer of information from one generation to the next.

Informational descriptions can be useful, but they do not explain how biological continuity is achieved. Genes, signals, developmental cues, and environmental regularities contribute to continuity only because they participate within living systems capable of maintaining viability-oriented organisation.

What is inherited is therefore not an informational entity considered in isolation, but the capacity for viable organisation to be reconstituted across generations.

This distinction matters because information does not persist independently of the systems that enact it. Biological continuity depends upon developmental processes, organism–environment relations, constraint structures, and other forms of organisation that collectively enable living systems to reconstruct themselves.

APS therefore treats informational language as a description of continuity rather than its ultimate explanation.

Inheritance is the continuity of viable organisation. Information contributes to this continuity, but does not constitute it.