Stasome

The stasome is the set of informational states that persist across reproductive cycles and that are transmitted vertically to descendants. In its narrowest form it is the DNA sequence. In its full covolutionary form it includes any substrate meeting three operational criteria: transmission on generational timescales, high copying fidelity, and vertical inheritance through reproductive continuity.

Examples of stasome content include:

1. The DNA sequence, including coding regions, regulatory elements, and non-coding architecture.
2. Heritable chromatin states, including methylation patterns and histone modifications that survive meiosis or analogous reproductive transitions.
3. Chromosomal organization and karyotype.
4. Cytoplasmically inherited elements such as mitochondrial DNA, plastid DNA, and certain structural templates and prions that meet the three criteria.
5. In principle, any future engineered or synthetic substrate that supports high-fidelity vertical transmission.

The stasome is the substrate that classical Darwinian theory is built on, and it is the substrate that natural selection operates on directly. Its high fidelity is its strength: it allows accumulated information to persist across deep evolutionary time. Its low plasticity is its limitation: it cannot respond to environmental change on the timescale of individual organism behavior.

The stasome is therefore broader than the genome. The genome is the DNA-sequence component of the stasome. The stasome additionally includes every other transgenerationally stable informational layer.