# Information Inheritance > **Machine-Evolution Nexus:** [[articles/Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution|Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution]] places this concept within the history and governance of substrate-independent evolution. **Domain:** Information / Evolution / Continuity **Doc Type:** Canonical Wiki Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition Information inheritance is the persistence of causally effective organization through copying, reconstruction, teaching or execution across generations or substrates. ## Machine-Evolution Context It unifies genetic, cultural and digital cases at a functional level while preserving their different media and error processes. ## Inheritance Layers - **Description:** the stored sequence, code, model or record. - **Interpreter:** the machinery that gives the description causal effect. - **Embodiment:** the active system produced or regulated through interpretation. - **Environment:** resources and constraints that determine whether the organization persists. - **Provenance:** the documented path connecting source, copy, mutation and descendant. The same description can produce different results under different interpreters or environments. Conversely, a lineage can preserve function while replacing much of its stored material. Information therefore inherits through a system, not through disembodied bits alone. ## Continuity Taxonomy Information inheritance can support [[wiki/Functional Continuity|functional continuity]], [[wiki/Memory Continuity|memory continuity]], [[wiki/Lineage|lineage]] and reconstruction. It does not collapse these into first-person continuity. A perfect archive can remain cold; a running descendant can be causally related without being numerically identical. ## Continuity and Evidence Boundary Information survival is not subject survival. Continuity architecture must distinguish archival persistence, executable reconstruction, lineage descent and first-person continuation. Governance must also identify who controls the interpreter, because control over execution can become control over whether inherited information ever becomes a living process again. ## Relationships [[wiki/Heritable Information|Heritable Information]], [[wiki/Inheritance|Inheritance]], [[wiki/Hot Interpreter and Cold Archive|Hot Interpreter and Cold Archive]], [[wiki/Reconstructed Person|Reconstructed Person]] ## Sources / Provenance - Philosophy of biology and information; continuity-corpus synthesis.