Machine Zygote: Causal Biparental Heredity Before Learning in a Germline--Soma Artificial Agent

Some aspects of AI development resemble a population process in which models are specialised, retrained on the output of peers, or combined by averaging weights. These practices lead to generations of models, in the biological sense studied by population genetics. Here, I develop this parallelism and interpret multigenerational model populations in terms of sexual and asexual reproduction, formally recombining the two fields. I test these analogies in an exact inheritance model, in trained networks (recurrent, feedforward and variational autoencoder generators) and in large language models, and show that they hold generally, with some measurable architecture-specific biases. Training recursively on model output is known to lead to model collapse, a process previously described as akin to genetic drift; I develop all that follows. A minimal model of a learner retrained on its parent's output reproduces the Wright-Fisher process exactly; verified real data added to each generation play the role of immigration, with the surprising finding that the absolute number of real data samples matters, not their share, exactly as in population genetics. Training a child on the average of its parents' outputs cancels the benefit of having several parents, matching blending inheritance (and reviving Jenkin's objection to Darwin), whereas combining parents so that each keeps its strongest contribution preserves it; merged language-model specialists exceeded every parent across seeds (the Fisher-Muller effect); and lineages become reproductively isolated, losing the ability to merge at all, when they have learned conflicting conventions and not when they have merely drifted apart. As AI societies become societies in time as well as in space, a mathematical framework for their inheritance acquires predictive power. Remarkably, that framework can be adapted almost wholesale from biology.

This work simulates the developmental process of cortical neurogenesis, initiating from a single stem cell and governed by gene regulatory rules derived from mouse single-cell transcriptomic data. The developmental process spontaneously generates a heterogeneous population of 5,000 cells, yet yields only 85 mature neurons - merely 1.7% of the total population. These 85 neurons form a densely interconnected core of 200,400 synapses, corresponding to an average degree of 4,715 per neuron. At iteration zero, this minimal circuit performs at chance level on MNIST. However, after a single epoch of standard training, accuracy surges to over 90% - a gain exceeding 80 percentage points - with typical runs falling in the 89-94% range depending on developmental stochasticity. The identical circuit, without any architectural modification or data augmentation, achieves 40.53% on CIFAR-10 after one epoch. These findings demonstrate that developmental rules sculpt a domain-general topological substrate exceptionally amenable to rapid learning, suggesting that biological developmental processes inherently encode powerful structural priors for efficient computation.

The origin of species has been the mystery of mysteries in natural science. By analogy, the origin of synthetic information, we suggest, is the mystery of mysteries in information science. The question carries a moral weight that a technical account can neither fully resolve nor responsibly ignore, as its impact on truth, trust, and human intellect extends deep into the broader economy and society. The very power of artificial intelligence makes the evolutionary lineage of synthetic information grow ever harder to trace, for a sufficiently capable model may generate offspring that bear little resemblance, at either the structural or signal level, to the parent source from which they were derived. As in genetics, two individuals may share the same phenotype mirroring each other in outward appearance, yet differ fundamentally in their genotype. We propose, by means of steganography, a mechanism analogous to heredity. At the moment an offspring is reproduced, a projector derives a trait from the parent, and a steganographic encoder invisibly hides it within the offspring. This trait persists throughout the offspring's life cycle in a cyber ecosystem. When parentage is queried, a steganographic decoder extracts the trait from the offspring and compares it against the traits of candidate parents in a reference pool, thereby nominating the most likely one. A theoretical analysis characterises phylogenetic accuracy as a function of projector and stegosystem properties, whilst empirical evaluations across multiple projectors and stegosystems demonstrate the viability of the proposed methodology under a broad spectrum of processing operations and semantic modifications. We envision a cyber ecosystem in which synthetic information, endowed with hidden yet traceable lineage traits, branches from a simple beginning into endless forms that have been, and are being, evolved.