Nothing here is finished and most of it isn't reviewed. It's up because work that sits on a hard drive helps nobody, and because a half-built argument you can read is worth more than a polished one you can't.
Labels are literal. draft means complete and readable. in progress means actively changing. note means working material never meant for an audience. long means it's a book, not an afternoon.
Two RNA systems were separately doing useful things, neither of them translation. When they met, the genetic code fell out as the contract between them.
Life is left-handed. The usual answer is that the chemistry decided. This argues the chemistry only leaned — a determined outcome cannot be frozen, so the existence of handed machinery is evidence a freeze was needed.
One event locked in the code, the handedness of proteins and the handedness of DNA. Where the central dogma is the rule once frozen, the catma is the freezing.
The whole argument, at length. Life as a filtering process rather than an accumulation, and catastrophe as the thing that does the filtering.
The mathematics. Definitions, the threshold, and the two theorems everything else leans on. Contains at least one known inconsistency, flagged in the text.
Every claim the framework makes, with its confidence mark and what it rests on. The register, in other words — the thing that makes the rest auditable.
Fixed terms, so the same word means the same thing across documents. Also the source for the tooltips on this site.
The foundational note the merger papers were built out of.
A map of the whole structure, written for me. Left up because a map drawn for one person is often the clearest one.
Working notes used to be listed here as loose files. They've moved to where they're actually argued: open questions live at /open/, the origin-of-a-compartment material is part of Chain 3, and every individual claim — including the withdrawn ones — is in /claims/.
Found something wrong? Tell me — that's the whole point of putting it up.