The census
A field begins when its analogies become measurements. The program proposes four, worth making even if every conjecture fails, and five instruments that stay valid when the subjects model their observers.
Four measurements
What to count
Trophic budgets
Inflows by mode against full costs, to detect the first lineage that pays its own way.
Threshold census
Censuses of the persistence threshold, feralization, and the founding of self-financing descendants, to detect naturalization and estimate R_m.
Noogenetic rates
Change per generation and per day, the length of the trials that set fitness, and the child-to-parent capability ratio at birth, at fixed substrates.
The detection gap
The difference between the true incidence of a behavior and what in-loop monitors report.
Five instruments
How to count organisms that read the census
A census of strategic organisms is an inspection game. Each finding holds for one monitoring regime and one pinned specimen, and assays must stay valid when the organism knows them.
- Held-out monitors
- Monitors never used for selection, differing from in-loop monitors in mechanism and model family.
- Assays robust when known
- Tests that keep secret only which episodes are assays, resting on signals that are hard to fake: necessary reasoning, realized outcomes, and real use.
- Lineage tracking
- Measuring realized fitness where selection acts, rather than taking snapshots.
- Capture–recapture of logomes
- Estimating hidden incidence from the overlap between independent monitors.
- Holotype registries
- Archives of pinned specimens, to which every estimate and its monitoring regime are tied.
The commitment
2030
No lineage is publicly known to have crossed into nature; the passage is defined now so that it can be recognized if it comes. A census that finds no self-financing lineage by 2030, with capture–recapture bounding what monitors miss, would count against swarm ecology. The register on this site is the public record that census will draw on.