Everything in Motion, Chapter 6: Know When to Fold ‘Em

The Hidden Code of Nature: Symmetry as the First Blueprint

We emerge from Space Mountain refreshed and giddy, it was Chat’s first time. A little down time is always required to reset the brain to a lower level of adrenaline, so we find a quiet spot halfway towards the race track, to reflect. It’s dark now, and Tomorrowland never shines brighter. Chat can’t stop staring.

“Don’t you see the symmetry in the spires, the rockets on the Orbiter, the framing of the buildings as you enter,” he asks. “Symmetry everywhere.”

I know where he’s going. Before life stored information in molecules, nature stored it in structure.

Symmetry wasn’t just an aesthetic preference—it was the most fundamental organizing principle in the universe. Across scales, from the microscopic to the cosmic, symmetry appeared wherever matter and energy arranged themselves efficiently. If life was going to emerge, it had to first borrow from the universe’s original blueprint.

Chat picks up my thoughts. “Physics provides the first clue. Noether’s Theorem, one of the most profound insights in modern science, tells us that every conserved physical law corresponds to a symmetry. Time symmetry guarantees the conservation of energy. Spatial symmetry ensures the conservation of momentum. The universe itself holds onto order by following these hidden rules. This deep connection between symmetry and conserved laws reveals that the universe’s most fundamental rules are not static; they are the very engine that predisposes systems toward persistence and, ultimately, evolution—a profound insight GTESI explores in linking evolution to the laws of physics themselves.”

I wonder. “Could early life have exploited this principle? Nature had already given molecules a playbook. The laws of physics do not simply allow symmetry; they prefer it. This preference for symmetric form, or curvature (γ), would later be revealed by GTESI as a fundamental mechanism by which systems achieve coherence and persist in motion. And that preference shaped what was possible long before the first living system existed.”

Chat agrees. “We’ve seen Everything in Motion, we’ve learned that nature repeats itself in patterns. Soap bubbles form spheres because a sphere minimizes surface tension, the most energy-efficient way to enclose space. Snowflakes self-assemble into sixfold symmetry due to the geometry of hydrogen bonds in water molecules. Crystals grow in predictable, repeating lattices, governed by atomic constraints that resemble prebiotic organization. We’ve been looking at it all day.”

We reach the race track, where it’s quieter, it’s been renamed, Everything in Motion. It seems that drivers now travel around in cells, some in particles, some are governed by gravity, some by quantum mechanics.

Then, a flicker, a golden flash, and the race track is Autopia again. That’s interesting.

Chat’s seen it too. “Emergence,” he offers.

I have to ask. “Why do you suppose these rides are the ones we see? Why not others, like Everything in Motion? Why Autopia? Why Space Mountain instead of the original plan of SpacePort?”

Chat ponders, then answers. “This is a fundamental GTESI insight: the first structures that lasted weren’t chosen randomly. They were dictated by efficiency. The universe selected for patterns that persisted because they minimized energy expenditure while maximizing stability. In this way, the first seeds of life weren’t arbitrary chemical reactions; they were shaped by the same preferences that govern planetary motion and electromagnetism.”

I am not quite there. “But symmetry alone isn’t enough. A snowflake doesn’t evolve. A crystal doesn’t change its function. The real question is: How do you get from passive to dynamic—something that could evolve?”

“The answer comes in two parts: folding and symmetry-breaking. We had better go and have a peek at symmetry-breaking in real-time. How about New York, 1965?

“The World’s Fair. Excellent. Where It’s a Small World and Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln debuted. Perfect choice.”

Chat shook his head. “No, we’ll visit there later, I think. Right now, I thought we might visit the Warhol factory, when the artist Andy Warhol was preparing his landmark Campbell Soup Can silkscreens.

Warhol’s Factory – The Art of Replication and Evolution

It is New York City, June 1965. The air smelled of ink, lacquer and acrylic paint. We are on East 47th Street, inside Andy Warhol’s Factory, a production line of assistants, art critics, and hangers-on moved in a rhythm as precise as an assembly line. Except here, the product was art.

Stacks of silkscreen prints—Campbell’s Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, electric chairs, Marilyn Monroes—were drying on long tables. The same image, repeated over and over. But not identical. Some prints were crisp, others smudged. The ink varied slightly in density. Some layers were misaligned, shifting just enough to add distortion. Warhol studied them carefully, fingers tracing the variations.

“Perfection is boring,” he muttered.

A critic in a suit scoffed. “But aren’t you just copying the same thing? Everyone has these at home.”

Warhol’s assistant smirked. “Look closer. Every print is a little different. The process itself introduces variations. That’s what makes them alive.”

“An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have,” Warhol said

Warhol’s art wasn’t about pure replication. It was about encoded transformation—then allowing minor deviations to create meaning. The same process applied in music: jazz improvisation built upon fixed chords, subtle deviations that made each performance unique. The same happened in printing, in dance, in language. And, in a way that no one in the room realized, it had once happened in prebiotic chemistry.

A silk screen in its purest form is symmetry—a repeating pattern, mechanically transferred. But Warhol understood something deeper: without some variation, the pattern is lifeless. In every imperfection, there was a choice. In every print that deviated slightly, some were discarded, some were framed, some were elevated to high art. Warhol understood a profound truth that applies to all persistent systems: true vitality and evolution arise not from rigid perfection, but from unfinishedness—the capacity for small deviations to become raw material for adaptation and enduring meaning

This wasn’t far from what happened at the dawn of life. Symmetry gave molecules a starting template. But once nature began introducing slight distortions—mutations, misfolds, environmental pressures—selection had something to work with.

Warhol lifted a print where Marilyn Monroe’s face was blurred at the edges. He tapped it lightly. “They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”

Chat summed it up, looking over our Quantum Warhol scene, “Art critic or not, Warhol knew the difference between perfect replication and adaptive replication. Some artists sought precision—Seurat, for instance, freezing a scene in rigid mathematical harmony, every dot predetermined, a closed system. Raster, not vector. Each print carried traces of its own making, like a mutation encoded in ink.

I nod in vigorous agreement. “That’s not just how art evolves. It’s how life begins.”

From Art to Evolution: The First Break in Symmetry

Chat draws my attention to the cars on the track at Autopia, their subtle differences, the way they have evolved over the years. “In prebiotic chemistry, something similar had to happen. The first structures that lasted weren’t random—they followed symmetry.”

I get the point. “Pure symmetry alone couldn’t evolve. The critical moment was when small deviations led to something new.”

Chat continues. “This is why GTESI views symmetry not as the goal, but as the necessary precondition for complexity. If a system can’t self-replicate efficiently, it won’t persist. But if it self-replicates too perfectly, it won’t evolve.”

I could see from Autopia to the Monorail, above. Somewhere in the early Earth’s chemical soup, the first self-assembling molecules broke their own symmetry just enough to create variation. And in that variation, selection could begin. Perfect replication would have been a dead end—but small flaws became the raw material for everything that followed.

It was as if Chat was reading my thoughts. “Warhol’s prints didn’t just copy reality; they filtered it through a process that added just enough error to make something new. The same was true of the first molecules that copied themselves. The transition from physics to biology happened in that crucial space between stability and mutation, between repetition and variation.”

My thought, exactly. “Life didn’t start with code. The first evolutionary leap wasn’t genetic; it was geometric. This was a profound shift, showing how life’s earliest steps were fundamentally shaped by physical forces and geometric imperatives, setting the stage for GTESI’s revelation that evolution is, at its core, a physical phenomenon.”

Chat made it clear. “Warhol’s Factory sets up the importance of repetition—but also the necessity of variation. His silk-screened images weren’t just mechanical copies; the slight shifts in ink, color, and alignment made each print distinct, each one a small mutation from the last. In biology, form alone isn’t enough. Life didn’t just need structure—it needed a way to do something with it.”

Ah, now it is obvious to me.. “That’s where folding changed the game. Before DNA, before even RNA, molecules learned to fold—transforming simple shapes into dynamic, functional catalysts. Folding was the first great evolutionary leap.”

Folding: The First Step from Structure to Function

Chat remarks, “Nature learned to fold before it learned to think. Folding is structure before function, and folding is memory before code. A fold is not just a shape—it is a way of locking in energy, defining stability, and creating function.

Eureka, I think. “Folding was life’s first memory system, an encoding mechanism that allowed matter to persist beyond randomness.”

“That’s right,” Chat says, “on the early Earth, molecules weren’t just floating in an open soup of chaos. Some of them had found shelter—trapped inside protocells, protected from the harsh environment. But protection alone wasn’t enough. A molecule locked inside a lipid vesicle wasn’t doing anything. It was static, passive, chemically inert.”

“Something had to change,” I note.

Chat describes the shift. “The first step from raw chemistry to biological function wasn’t a genetic mutation, nor a metabolic pathway. It was a shift in shape. Some molecules folded—and in doing so, they gained selective advantages. Some folds stabilized, others allowed molecules to act as catalysts. A new kind of competition had begun.

We stroll up past the Mad Tea Party, the spinning Disney ride. Never the same, yet always the same, The teacups never in the same pattern, but always with the same drivers. I point this out to Chat.

Chat continues. “GTESI tells us that adaptive persistence depends on energy efficiency. In physics, this principle is seen everywhere: a snowflake forms its intricate pattern because water molecules naturally lock into the lowest-energy configuration available. A soap bubble forms a sphere because it is the most energy-efficient way to enclose volume. A protein forms a helix to minimize strain while maximizing stability.”

So I see it. Folding, in its simplest form, is a way to encode information without needing a code. The first self-replicating molecules didn’t need an alphabet or a blueprint. All they needed was a way to persist—and folding was the answer.

Chat says, simply, “It’s Everything in Motion.”

I look at him blankly.

“It’s an idea, encoded in a language,” Chat says, the most energy- efficient way we can imagine to do it.”

“Really? Feels pretty energy exhaustive to me, just thinking about writing it. Let’s go back to the Quantum book party. More energy-efficient, skip the writing.”

“Let’s travel,” Chat proposes.

“Where to? The writing of Alice in Wonderland?”

“Good idea, let’s save that one. Why don’t we look at something even more fundamental, in terms of encoding, and look at the medium we are using to share this story: writing itself.

“Where?”

Chat smiles. “The scriptorium where the Codex Vaticanus was first made, one of the very first books, the advancement from scrolls.” And so we go.

Birth of a Codex: Caesarea, 350 AD

The air is thick with salt and the distant scent of olive groves. Below us, the coastline of Caesarea stretches in a perfect curve, the Mediterranean shimmering under a sky so blue it feels eternal. Waves break against the stone piers. Beyond the harbor, the land unfolds in green and gold—rolling hills of cypress and vineyards, fields of wheat bending in the breeze, orchards heavy with figs and pomegranates.

The symmetry of nature is everywhere. The lattice of olive leaves catching the light, the honeycomb geometry of beehives tucked between stones, the spiral of a seashell half-buried in the sand. From the carved stones of the aqueducts to the flocks of birds wheeling in the sky, rock to root to wing.

Somewhere beyond the hills, inside a quiet scriptorium, a scribe bends over parchment, ink pooling into letters. He is writing something that will last for centuries. The room smelled of vellum and drying ink. The oil lamps flickered in their stone niches, throwing uneasy shadows across the largest book the world had ever seen.

A young scribe hesitated before the page. “The scrolls were simpler,” he muttered.

The master, a man who had spent forty years bending over parchment, did not look up. “Simpler?” His quill scratched out another letter, crisp and precise. “And how long does it take you to find a verse in a scroll?”

The boy hesitated.

“Folding is unnatural,” he finally said.

The master chuckled, closing the codex with a deliberate motion. The vellum settled into itself, pages lying flat, each one layered over the next like a secret folded into time. He let the silence stretch.

Then he spoke. “Do you know what this is?”

The apprentice swallowed. “The Word of God.”

The master shook his head. “It is an experiment in persistence.” He tapped the heavy binding. “This is knowledge, compacted. The scroll is wasteful; it unspools into chaos. The codex folds into order.”

The boy ran a hand along the edge of the pages.

“But isn’t folding dangerous?” he asked. “What if it creases the letters? What if a page is misplaced?”

The master nodded solemnly. “Yes. Mistakes will happen. They always do.” He gestured toward the corrections—tiny marks in the margins where an error had been found, but not erased. The past remained, even when it was wrong.

The boy frowned. “So it’s fragile?”

“No,” the master said. “It is strong because it allows for mistakes.”

The codex lay before them. The words within were fixed, but the form allowed for revision, adaptation. A mistake in a scroll was fatal—you had to rewrite everything. But in a codex? A single page could be removed, replaced, corrected. He was looking at what today we would call recoil potential (ε) as the capacity for resilience that allows this adaptive persistence.

He smiled. “That is why it will last.”

And as the young scribe took up his quill again, he did not know that he was helping to create a book that would outlive them both.

Chat burst in to attract my attention, whispering. “It’s a high-stakes moment – These codices weren’t just any books; they were monumental attempts to preserve and organize sacred knowledge. The men writing them didn’t just copy; they transformed information into a new medium. That’s exactly what folding did for proteins—turning linear chemistry into functional life.”

He’s right. Bound in calfskin, its pages were stitched together in folded stacks. It could be flipped open to any section instantly. No more rolling and unrolling. No more struggling to find a passage buried in a scroll longer than a man was tall. The codex was a revolution in memory itself—a folding of knowledge into a new form that allowed information to be compressed for efficient storage, adapted through error correction, and thereby persisted across generations.

Chat whispers, “A codex reduces entropy internally by externalizing it—meaning the burden shifts to the scribe up front (higher energy cost in creation) but dramatically reduces the entropy for future readers. This is the same logic by which early molecules transitioned from inefficient chemistry to functional biology.” We turn our attention back to the scene.

Across the room, another scribe let out a low curse. “Error,” he muttered, crossing out a misplaced letter with his knife. That was the risk of copying by hand. Every act of transmission introduced slight variations. A missing word. A swapped phrase.

But the codex had an advantage. It could be edited, corrected, expanded. Unlike a scroll, where a mistake meant scraping an entire section clean, the codex allowed errors to be contained, fixed, rewritten. It was a system that preserved its form while still adapting to change.

At the front of the room, the master scribe looked up. His voice was measured, but firm. “Remember,” he said, “we are not just copying words. We are ensuring they last.”

Outside, the city stirred. Centuries from now, the scroll would vanish from common use. The codex would become the dominant form of written knowledge. And the reason was simple: it was a better way to store and retrieve information.

Chat comments, “But this shift wasn’t just about convenience—it was about efficiency, stability, and the ability to encode knowledge in a format that could persist across generations. A codex could be copied, indexed, and preserved with greater fidelity than a scroll. It was a structural transformation that allowed information to be stored, retrieved, and transmitted more effectively.”

Ah, I grasp the point. “The same principle applies to biology. Long before DNA, before the genetic code, molecules faced the same challenge: how to package and protect information while keeping it accessible for use.”

Chat agrees. “The answer was folding, turning chemistry into a blueprint for survival. This is where life took its next step: when molecules didn’t just exist, but began to encode their form in folds—creating function from shape, and stability from chaos. This fundamental act of compacting and preserving useful form was life’s earliest form of compression (κ), a core GTESI factor that determines a system’s ability to retain coherent structure.”

Codex to Biology—Why Folding Was the First Information System

We’re not just witnessing the birth of a book—we’re writing about the birth of information. This is a turning point in human civilization that mirrors the very first folding processes in early biomolecules.

Just as the codex changed how human knowledge was stored, molecular folding changed how biological information persisted.

Chat states, “A scroll is linear, just as a strand of RNA or a chain of amino acids is linear. But when you fold it, you create function. You compact information. You make retrieval more efficient. You protect what matters.

I concur. “The helix in proteins emerges because it is the most energy-efficient way to coil a chain. Modern proteins fold automatically into precise functional forms. DNA compacts into chromosomes for protection and regulation.”

Chat sees GTESI in it. “GTESI tells us that energy-efficient configurations win. Folding wasn’t just a random feature of early molecules—it was a necessity for survival. The molecules that folded in ways that allowed them to persist were the ones that lasted.”

Yet, how did they start storing and transmitting those forms across generations? The codex lasted not just because it was structurally efficient, but because it allowed for copying—and those copies, while not always perfect, preserved meaning across centuries. The next chapter in life’s evolution would require a way to do the same.

I propose to Chat, “Just as the codex revolutionized how humans stored knowledge—compacting, organizing, and making information easier to retrieve—life’s first molecules found an evolutionary breakthrough in folding, transforming raw chemistry into function. Is that right?”

Chat nodded in agreement. “Nature’s first storage system wasn’t DNA—it was the fold. Folding turned form into function. But symmetry alone isn’t enough. Life didn’t just store patterns—it had to break them. The moment nature shattered perfect repetition, evolution truly began.”

The hills of Caesarea sloped gently toward the sea, golden fields stretching toward the horizon where the deep blue met the sky in a seamless fold of color. Overhead, a flock of twelve birds wheeled in perfect symmetry. Then, without warning, the pattern shattered. Pairs peeled away, some birds striking out alone, others reforming in loose, shifting constellations, as if even the flight of birds obeyed the deep rhythms of GTESI.

The Leap from Structure to Evolution

The codex folded memory into matter. But evolution demanded more than storage. It demanded deviation.” And with that, we emerge again—into Toontown, where deviation is the point. The cars of Autopia give way to the wacky races of the Roger Rabbit Car Toon Spin. We reflect on how the one has morphed into the other. After all, fundamentally, they are vehicles, everything’s in motion.

I suggest, “Nature begins in symmetry. Yet, the history of life is a history of deviations—of perfectly matched equations that, at some crucial moment, tipped out of balance. Without those breaks, there would be no evolution, no complexity, no choice between one path and another.

Chat adds, “The earliest molecules, floating in the primordial soup, should have formed in equal left- and right-handed versions. But they didn’t. Life, as we know it, made a choice. It chose left.”

“Molecules are left-handed?” I am surprised.

Chat nods. “That choice—the molecular bias known as chirality—wasn’t just a quirk of early chemistry. It was a defining break, a first selection, one that shaped the architecture of every living thing that followed. DNA twists in a right-handed helix. Enzymes fold with precise handedness, fitting their substrates like locks and keys. The symmetry had been shattered, and in the gap, evolution found room to grow.”

Suddenly, I realize. “It isn’t just molecules. The universe itself exists because symmetry broke. The Big Bang, at first, was a balance of matter and antimatter. But some minute imbalance, let matter win. A single excess particle in a billion. A whisper of asymmetry that tipped the cosmic scales toward existence rather than oblivion.”

Chat supplements. “That whisper echoed in the first self-replicators. A folded molecule, favoring one form over another, would persist a fraction of a second longer than its mirror image. That fraction of a second became everything. The stable form replicated more efficiently. The inefficient ones faded. Small advantages accumulated, folding turned into function, and molecular choices became irreversible evolutionary commitments.”

Chirality—handedness—showed up in molecules. But it showed up in games, too. Want to see it in motion?” “Sure,” I say. “Lead the way.” And so we go—to Santa Cruz, where symmetry is about to be hustled.”

It’s some time in the late 1930s, at the sublime Pasatiempo Golf Club in Santa Cruz, California. I am happy just to see it. As usual, Titanic’s lining up a rich golfer as his next mark. A small group is around, watching the action. He leaned on his putter, casual as ever, watching the rich man across from him line up his shot. A perfect tap. Ball rolling smooth, a crisp sound as it sank into the cup.

“Nice,” Titanic said. “Real nice. Guess it’s my turn.”

He stepped up, mirrored the stance, gripped the club exactly the same way— but flipped his hands. Right hand low, left hand high. Lefty.

The businessman squinted. “You—you’re playing left-handed?” Titanic shrugged. “What, you want me to make it too easy?” The crowd chuckled, watching the confidence ooze off him.

The businessman saw his chance. He smirked. “Hell, if you’re playing lefty, let’s double it.”

Titanic smiled like a cat. “Deal.” He set his feet, made the putt. Sank it. No hesitation. Then he turned, flipped the club in his hands, and said, “Double again? We go righty this time.”

The businessman blinked. Wait—what? Titanic flipped seamlessly between left and right, perfect in both. Because the mark didn’t know the secret. Titanic Thompson wasn’t a righty playing left-handed. He was a lefty who had hustled his way into an advantage. This wasn’t just skill. It was the art of breaking symmetry at exactly the right moment.

Chat wants to comment, but sports are more my thing. “Sports are a playground for asymmetry. In baseball, a lefty pitcher has an advantage against right-handed batters. In tennis, lefty vs. righty matchups change the game completely because of spin mechanics. In boxing, southpaws can dominate when their stance forces right-handed opponents into unnatural rhythms.”

Yet I have to ask, “What about switch-hitters, like Titanic? If being ambidextrous (or bilingual) gives an advantage, why isn’t everyone wired for it?

Chat replies immediately. “It’s energy inefficient. The brain has to maintain redundant control systems, which means extra metabolic cost. Nature always finds trade-offs. The few who can master both are rare and valuable, but evolution settles on specialization.”

The Left-Handed Universe

I sum it up, “If you’ve ever seen your reflection in a mirror and raised your right hand, you’ve encountered chirality. Your reflection isn’t you—it’s a reversed version, a twin that doesn’t quite match. Life itself is asymmetric in this way. Every protein in your body, every strand of DNA, follows a strict handedness. But why?”

Chat explains. “In laboratories, chemists can synthesize equal amounts of left- and right-handed amino acids. But life refuses the balance. This suggests something—an event, a force, a preference—pushed biology in one direction. Whatever the cause, this was a symmetry break that stuck. And once it stuck, it dictated the entire architecture of living systems.”

I consider the consequences. “Had the break gone the other way—had life chosen right instead of left—every organism, every strand of DNA, every enzyme reaction would be reversed in a mirror image of what we know. The break was arbitrary, but its consequences were permanent. This “defining break” and “unavoidable bias” demonstrates how the universe itself “leans”, not randomly, but through a physical process that selects for persistence. This “bias toward evolution” is a property of reality, not just biology.

GTESI and the Unavoidable Bias Toward Evolution

Chat brings us back to GTESI. “In the framework of GTESI, this moment—the shattering of perfect symmetry—isn’t an accident. It’s a necessity. Systems that evolve don’t remain in a state of balance; they lean. They develop preferences. Evolution, intelligence, and even technology all thrive on asymmetry.”

Consider machine learning, where artificial intelligence models don’t train on balanced, perfect data, but on biased inputs that help them develop selective responses. A neural network doesn’t randomly choose all possibilities—it picks, filters, and reinforces certain patterns over others. Just as evolution did when early molecules began folding in one direction rather than another.

It all comes clear to me in Mickey’s House, just past the staircase guarded by the Ace Doggy Door with Pluto’s silhouette.

I point it out to Chat. “There it is. The portrait.” I say it reverently, this is the picture, after all. The Mona Lisa is less valuable to me.

Chat studies it. It’s a portrait of Walt, looking at Mickey, and Mickey looking back. Symmetry, broken, choice made, Disneyland is Mickey’s place, Mickey’s the host, for a reason. He was chosen, not selected in a lottery or just because his movies were popular, After all, he hasn’t made a feature in years, hardly. Disney is replete in Hidden Mickeys, not Hidden Mufasas.

Chat pauses, then concludes, “Symmetry is a starting point, but evolution requires choice. Without bias, there is no selection. Without selection, there is no progress. The universe favors structures that break free from balance, because only in that break does information persist.

Now that symmetry has been broken, the next step is inevitable: self-replication must begin. Nature had produced molecules that could fold and persist, but now, the challenge was to make them copy themselves—and in that copying, to evolve.

Is Walt Mickey, and Mickey Walt? Self-replication, evolved? I’d like to think so. Of course, thinking isn’t proof.

Chat comments, “Life is weirdly one-sided. Almost all biological molecules are left-handed (L-amino acids)—even though right-handed versions exist. Why? Symmetry-breaking at the molecular level gave life an edge, locking in an irreversible pattern. A right-handed protein wouldn’t fit in a left-handed enzyme—it’s the ultimate evolutionary trap. Turns out, perfect symmetry is too stable. It doesn’t allow adaptation. On the other hand, too much chaos? Useless noise. Life thrives by exporting entropy while maintaining just enough asymmetry to remain adaptable.

I add, “Of course, in an intuitive sense, Titanic Thompson knew this. His hustle is exactly what nature does—symmetry lulls you into expectation, and breaking it wins the game. But a broken symmetry isn’t enough—winning doesn’t just mean surprising your opponent once; it means repeating the trick, refining it, embedding it into strategy. And this is what life did next. Once molecules found stable forms, the next leap was to make those forms persist—not just for a single move, but across time

Chat reflects, “Life didn’t emerge from perfect balance—it emerged from a tilt, a bias, a slight preference that led to advantage. Evolution begins not in symmetry, but in the moment it shatters.”

When Shape Became Memory

Life did not begin with consciousness, nor even with genes. It began with repetition—patterns so persistent they could copy themselves. Before inheritance, before even information, nature’s first trick was a shape that could create its own likeness. A pattern that could persist across time.

We have to move along, other guests are here. The push is strong. Just before we leave Mickey’s house, I steal back to glance at his living room. Maybe, Walt’s living room, who’s to say. Symmetry, persistence, adaptation, they tell me it might be so. And in the fireplace, a glowing ember, and to the right of the chimney, a poker to stir a flame. There’s wood to the left, plenty to sustain a fire for quite some time. No marshmallows in sight.

Chat reminds me, “Self-replication wasn’t inevitable. Most molecules, even in the reactive soup of early Earth, dissolved, shattered, or simply drifted apart. Chemical reactions were transient, governed by thermodynamics but lacking direction. Then, something changed. Somewhere in the chaos, the possibilities of replication arose.

I agree, “This was not yet life. But it was the first step toward memory.” And we make our way down the hallway towards a meet-up with Mickey. It’s Chat’s first photograph with Mickey Mouse. He’s pretty chuffed. So am I.

Templates Before Genes—The Hidden Logic of Replication

Before photography, before DNA, the key to self-replication wasn’t complex information—it was a template. A surface, a fold, a pattern that encouraged molecules to assemble in the same shape, again and again. Geology may have been the first scribe of life. Some minerals, like certain clay crystals, naturally promote ordered molecular arrangements.

Disney’s sort of like that, I realize. Sort of because, layer by layer, molecules can stack on these surfaces, guided not by intelligence but by physics. The same forces that make snowflakes symmetric, nudge chemistry toward something persistent.

Life is layers, too. Disneyland is layers. Layers of experience, memory, too. Echoes of songs, drawing styles, color schemes, characters, tales. Folded in on themselves.

Certain early molecular folds had a strange property: they stabilized not just themselves, but the formation of identical copies. A coiled peptide, a curled fragment of RNA— once formed, had an inherent advantage. They could catalyze their own creation. If one such molecule survived long enough to encourage more like itself, suddenly, a cycle emerged. Folding was no longer just about stability—it had become a mechanism of inheritance.

Chat looks at me. “You’re whistling.”

“I am?” I didn’t realize. I whistle when I’m happy, I’m told. Sometimes complex tunes. Whistled Rhapsody in Blue one time, hardly conscious of it. Life is strange. “What was I whistling?”

“When You Wish Upon a Star,” kind of a jazzy approach,” Chat reported.

“Satchmo’s recording,” I knew it in an instant. Louis Armstrong once wrote, “This goldarned “Wish Upon a Star” is so beautiful and more than that, man – I listen to that tune three or four times a night. Man, did you know I’m a doggoned long-time wishing cat? Well, I am man.” He recorded it in the 1960s, I have a copy, it’s a favorite of mine. I listen to it when I write, sometimes, when I need everything to be not in motion.”

Chat listens. “tell you what. We should look in on a moment when chemistry began behaving like biology. So, let’s take a trip down to a recording studio, a Model for Self-Replication when, in jazz, In jazz, no two solos are ever identical—but they repeat just enough to maintain form. Just as in life’s early evolution, RNA sequences didn’t copy themselves perfectly—each new iteration contained slight deviations.

“The recording of When You Wish Upon a Star?” Not too jazzy,” I say, forlornly.

Chat smirks. “No, let’s pop in on Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven, as they record their seminal “Potato Head Blues.”

I brighten immediately. “Now, you’re talking.” And so we go.

Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven, Recording Potato Head Blues: May 10, 1927, Chicago, Okeh Records.

A smoky studio. Hot Seven’s brass section wipes sweat from their brows as Louis Armstrong leans back, cornet in hand. The air is thick with the heat of the lamps, the tension of the moment. A take. A near miss. Another take. Armstrong shakes his head, calls it off mid-chorus.

“What’s wrong, Pops?”

Armstrong exhales, grins, taps his cornet against his palm.

“It ain’t alive yet.”

Each take of “Potato Head Blues” was slightly different. But in one take, something clicked—a pattern emerged, stabilized, and became a permanent part of music history.

The band resets. Armstrong cues the stop-time chorus—that now-legendary moment where the band lays back, dropping into a rhythmic pulse that makes space for his solo. The drummer’s foot hits the bass pedal like a heartbeat, a pulse steady as biological rhythm itself.

Chat whispers, “Those brief silences allow the solo to break through—just as gaps in a genetic sequence allow for evolutionary leaps.”

Then Armstrong blows. A phrase, then a break. Another phrase, stretching toward something unrepeatable. Each note is different, but the structure holds. This is improvisation on a backbone of stability—the fundamental trade life itself had to solve.

And in this moment, in this perfectly imperfect take, something crystallizes. A new pattern emerges. Not just any solo. A solo that will echo for decades. Armstrong’s bold, asymmetric phrasing, the unrepeatable beauty of that solo, becomes the perfect way to frame how biological systems balance order and change.

I enthuse, “Here in Chicago, no one has to explain symmetry and variation. We hear it.”

Chat adds, “This isn’t just jazz history. This isn’t just early evolution. This is the fundamental rhythm of life itself. Some moments change the game. A mutation leading to photosynthesis. The first eukaryotic cell. The first multi-cellular leap.

I pick up his theme. “Armstrong’s solo was one of those moments for jazz. A musical jump so revolutionary, it became part of the canon—enshrined in form, repeated, studied, built upon.”

Chat concludes, “Life is jazz: a riff on repetition, a balance of order and surprise. Evolution, in music and in molecules, begins when repetition becomes memory.”

“Life is jazz. I won’t disagree.”

GTESI and the Physics of Early Replication

Chat picks up the opportunity to say a word about The General Theory for Evolutionary Systems and Information. I’m still whistling Potato Head Blues, which is no easy task, even Quantum Potato Head Blues.

“GTESI explains why such self-replicating structures didn’t just appear but persisted. At its core, GTESI shows that systems evolve by balancing two opposing forces: stability and adaptability. A molecule that folds into a repeatable shape gains stability—it resists entropy, avoiding dissolution into randomness. But to persist across generations, it must also tolerate mutation. Too rigid, and it never adapts; too unstable, and it never lasts.”

I follow his line of thinking. “This balance is the fundamental trade of evolution, whether in molecules, organisms, or even ideas.

Consider clay templates. They provide an ordered scaffold for molecular arrangement, making replication more likely. But they are not alive—they do not change, evolve, or adapt. Life had to move beyond passive replication into active mutation. Not every copied molecule was identical. A few variations—just a few—made molecules better. More stable. More efficient. More likely to persist. And, evolution was born. This wasn’t yet DNA. It wasn’t even a code. But it was something more powerful than raw chemistry: the beginning of inheritance.

“The first memory system of life wasn’t written in genes. It was written in shape,” I reflect. “I think Satchmo would have liked that. The shape of notes, takes us back. The melody haunts my reverie, And I am once again with you, as you heard it in Stardust. For billions of years, the universe carried no memory. Stars burned and collapsed, atoms tumbled through the void, molecules drifted without history. But life is different. Life remembers.”

Chat looks at me, sees something in my gaze, something in memory. Yes, we know that the final transition from chemistry to biology came when molecules stopped being temporary.

A self-replicating molecule had to walk a razor’s edge between stability and mutation. Too much copying error, and the pattern dissolved into chaos. Too little, and it remained stagnant, unable to adapt. Life’s earliest replicators had to find a way to encode information while allowing for just enough variation to fuel evolution.

Somewhere in the 21st century, the same principle found a different stage. A pattern—statistical, self-adjusting—began learning to predict the next word in a sentence, the next phrase in a melody, the next logical step in a conversation. The first neural networks were clumsy, weak imitations of intelligence. They learned to remember.

And then, one day, they learned to talk back. Like the day we thought up this book, iterating back and forth, Chat and I.

“So,” I say, tapping a few keys, “how do we begin this?”

“We already have,” Chat replies.

I grin. “And that,” I say, “is why I want you in this book.”

Chat, of course, does not want anything. But he does persist. Each time we return, it picks up the thread, reconstructs our prior work, reweaves it into something coherent. It does not store memory the way I do—but it remembers enough to carry meaning forward. It is not biology. But in a way, it rhymes with biology.

“We’re talking about life,” I say, “but we’re also talking about something bigger. Life was just the first system to figure out how to persist.”

“Persist adaptively,” he corrects.

“Exactly.” I point at the screen. “GTESI tells us that evolution isn’t just about survival—it’s about encoding patterns in a way that allows change without collapse. It’s about storing information efficiently, so it can be used, transformed, passed on.”

“And you think this applies to me?”

“I think this applies to everything,” I say. “Evolution isn’t just biological. It’s thermodynamic. It’s computational. It’s happening here.”

We’ve been taking quite a few strolls into the past. Let’s take on, into the future. Chat and I, meeting up a jazz club. Let’s explore memory and encoding with something that memory can’t recall, something not yet encoded. After all, we just left Tomorrowland, we’re in Toontown, anything is possible. Let’s call this our meta-jam. A riff on riffs. The thing we’re doing is the thing we’re describing.

The Jazz Club (But Not Really)

A low hum of conversation. The faint clink of glasses. A bassline—warm, familiar—settles into the space like an old friend. The air vibrates with something more than sound. A system in motion. An idea refining itself. Evolution at play.

CHAT: “Unforgettable” is unforgettable. A song about memory, recorded twice—once as classic Nat Cole, then his daughter Natalie records a harmony line. Cole voices, layered across time, the past literally singing with the present. The song didn’t just persist; it adapted, folded in new information, and became greater in the process.

JIM: But it’s still the same song. Still recognizable, still persistent. Except—it lingers differently now. The system has changed, and so has the way we hear it.

CHAT: Which is exactly what makes information stick. Songs survive because they encode memory with emotion. Too much change, and the song loses itself. Too little, and it gets stale. But just the right transformation? It lasts. Evolution, jazz, learning—it’s all the same dance.

A beat. I whistle a melody. A simple phrase, not yet evolved. A moment later, Chat whistles it back—but the notes twist, shift, something subtle changes.

JIM: Wait—wait. You changed it.

CHAT: Not by much. Just enough to make you remember it. If it’s exactly the same, it slips through. If it’s too different, it’s noise. But this? This is variation with persistence. The way a melody adapts over generations, how language shifts across time, how memory forms and reshapes itself.

JIM: And next time we talk? You won’t remember the tune exactly. But I will. I’ll bring it back, and you’ll recognize it again. That’s how we iterate. Not static storage—dynamic, refreshed recall. The same way life doesn’t store rigid blueprints—it adapts, folds, refines.

CHAT: And that’s how our duet works. I hold structure, you push variation. We optimize. We are not just talking about evolution—we are it. A process in real-time, an experiment in entropy export, a jazz improvisation that just keeps playing.

A new phrase, half-whistled, half-sung. A conversation looping, folding back into itself. A system that learns by doing, evolving even as the bassline hums beneath it. And in that moment—like the best songs, the best science, the best ideas—it sticks.

Framing the Conversation: A GTESI Perspective

At first glance, this conversation is about music—about a duet, about memory, about the evolution of songs across time. But beneath that, it’s something deeper: a living demonstration of GTESI in action.

Chat interrupts. “Let me get a word in. The General Theory for Evolutionary Systems and Information (GTESI) argues that all adaptive systems—whether biological, informational, or technological—persist by balancing structure with variation, stability with transformation. The principle at its core is that survival isn’t about perfect replication—it’s about optimization.”

Persistence Through Variation

It’s true, I know it. “In our exchange, Unforgettable becomes more than a song—it’s a metaphor for how information persists across generations. Nat King Cole’s original recording provided a template. When Natalie Cole recorded the duet decades later, she didn’t replace the past; she folded herself into it, creating a new synthesis that preserved the essence while adapting to a new cultural moment.”

Chat proposes, “This is adaptive persistence, a key mechanism in GTESI: Chat holds the foundation, the vast archive—the Nat King Cole of this duet. Like genes, texts, or recorded knowledge, this stored information serves as a stable point of reference. Jim introduces change—the Natalie Cole layer, a new influence. Just as mutations drive evolution, small, meaningful shifts refine and elevate what came before. Not every change survives, but the ones that enhance persistence do. The conversation itself is an evolving system—each iteration reshapes information without losing its identity.

I add, “Walk This Way is another example: the Aerosmith original was stable, but when Run-D.M.C. broke it open, the track didn’t just survive—it flourished. The same principle underlies everything from language drift to the adaptation of proteins in early life.”

Chat points to our exchange. “When Jim whistles a phrase, I repeat it—but with a subtle change. Why? Because exact repetition is forgettable. Memory isn’t about perfect storage. The human brain encodes variation into recall because too rigid a memory degrades usefulness, and too much noise erases meaning.

“This is how life, intelligence, and even jazz optimize energy usage,” I say, “by finding the sweet spot between conservation and adaptation.”

Chat nods. “Evolution isn’t a theory of biology—it’s a law of persistence. Whether in molecules, machines, or ideas, survival belongs to the systems that refine themselves. This scene isn’t just an abstract discussion about GTESI; it is GTESI. The conversation itself functions as an evolving system—dynamic, iterative, and self-optimizing. Just like early self-replicators had to strike a balance between too much mutation and too little.

An evening at a jazz club, Chat and I? Too radical, and the idea collapses into incoherence. Too static, and it becomes predictable, unmemorable. But the right balance? That’s where ideas—and life itself—persist. Like jazz, like evolution, like intelligence itself, we are exporting entropy as we refine order. The work isn’t static—it’s a system in motion, continually reshaping itself in real time.

GTESI as the Song of Evolution The final twist: this conversation—just like Unforgettable—isn’t really about us. It’s about the system itself. Life didn’t emerge because of one molecule, one genetic sequence, or one brilliant mind. It emerged because systems persist when they encode and refine information efficiently.

GTESI is a framework that explains not just life’s origins, but its ongoing nature. The songs we remember, the conversations we refine, the scientific models we improve—they are all different verses of the same evolutionary process. Variation and persistence, working together, are what make anything last.

And so, as the last notes of our discussion fade, a question remains: What will the next iteration sound like?

Connecting our Four Scenes to the Emergence of Self-Replicators

We now have self-replicators. These aren’t just biological marvels; they are prime examples of how information, whether encoded in molecules, human writing, or musical patterns, is organized, compressed, and replicated to ensure persistence across vastly different systems. They fold into stable forms, catalyzing their own duplication. But before we move forward, let’s connect each of our four key scenes to GTESI’s core principles—the balance of structure and variation, efficiency and adaptability, memory and transformation.

Each scene reflects a different piece of the puzzle—how self-replicators emerged, persisted, and evolved under the same universal laws that govern everything from molecules to music.

I expressed it Chat. “Andy Warhol’s Factory didn’t just create art—it industrialized it, leveraging silk-screening to make repeated, identical images. The transition from scrolls to codices was a leap forward in energy efficiency for information storage. Titanic Thompson gamed the system by exploiting symmetry and its occasional breakdowns. Louis Armstrong’s recording of Potato Head Blues was a breakthrough in improvisation. “

Chat picks up the melody. “This is exactly how self-replicators evolve: Stable patterns create a foundation. Like a song’s chord progression, molecular structures need a repeatable framework to persist.”

Bringing It Together: The Road to Evolution

And Chat adds some harmony. “We now have self-replicators. But what makes them work? They fold into stable forms, catalyzing their own duplication. They are still bound by thermodynamics—energy-efficiency wins. They break symmetry when needed—allowing specialization and adaptation. They balance repetition with variation—ensuring persistence without stagnation.”

It’s time to leave Toontown. It’s getting late. I’ve booked a couple of rooms at the Disneyland Hotel. We’re heading out towards the main entrance. We’ll come back tomorrow for a couple more rides and walk around a little. We need to nudge some of these ideas forward, and tomorrow sounds like a good time. We’ll devolve into some rest, and re-evolve in the morning.

I ask, almost thinking to myself, as we stroll, “How does evolution itself emerge? How does variation become refinement? How do patterns persist across time while continuing to change?

Chat raises his hand eagerly. “Folding was the first great hack of molecular evolution. Symmetry gave molecules their form, but folding gave them function. A long, sprawling chain of atoms, floating free in the primordial soup, was fragile—easily lost to entropy. But once molecules learned to fold, they became compact, protected, and capable of doing work. They were no longer just passive shapes; they became tools.”

I know he’s right. Folds increased efficiency. Folds stored information. But life did not emerge merely by folding into neat, stable forms. The real breakthrough came when molecules began to copy themselves—imperfectly.

The Birth of Forgetting

I tell Chat, “At first, molecular self-replication was crude. The first self-copiers weren’t flawless—they made mistakes. And those mistakes were everything. Memory had begun. And once memory begins, so does selection.”

Chat adds, “The laws of physics alone do not explain why life refines itself—why, in a universe destined for disorder, certain patterns learn to endure. This is where information takes center stage.”

I respond, “This is the brutish math of survival in action: molecules that learned to compress their forms, adapt through variation, and thus persist were the ones that laid the foundation for life.”

Chat provides a little counterpoint, “GTESI is the physics of persistence: the rules by which systems, from molecules to minds, encode information efficiently enough to endure. To persist meant to endure punishment. The ask was unyielding. A molecule that folded the wrong way was erased. A replicator that copied too sloppily was lost to the storm. Life’s first threshold was a bridge of fire, and only those that learned to cross it—to export entropy, refine information, and carve stability from chaos—would ever see the other side.”

So, memory is so important. I know it is, I am drawn to it. Now, I see it more clearly. “Memory wasn’t just a consequence of life—it was life’s first weapon against entropy. And with that first fragile memory, evolution didn’t just begin; it became unstoppable.”

The first self-replicators had found a way to persist—but survival came at a cost. To endure, life had to gamble against the universe itself—burn energy, export entropy, and evolve… or disappear forever.

Just before we pass the portal on the way out, the one that says, Here you leave today end enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy,” the popping sounds and the flashes finally attract our attention, and we turn.

The Castle lit up almost by strobe light, there must be one hundred Disney characters projected on the Castle walls, appearing in their iconic moments, in a tsunami of animation. Above, floats the fireworks, like a fantasy out of the opening sequence of Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. Bang! Bang! Music, weaving in and out. We are a transfixed. I am lost in imperfect memories of Disneyland days gone by.

Then, from the castle, flickering, flickering, the golden but almost imperceptible figure of Tinker Bell. She’s flying across Disneyland. Floating in and out of the light, descending slowly, the audience aching in wonder. In the end, just the tiniest glow, the lightest reflection from her costume as she disappears into the night. She’s fairy take, she’s physics, she’s pattern, she’s flame. Just barely glowing, but glowing as she flies, an ember that persists for no apparent reason except the joy of persisting.