2026/05/15 by Rowan Brad Quni-Gudzinas · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Language and cultural evolution #Slime Mold and Myxomycetes Research #Origins and Evolution of Life
paper · doi:10.5281/zenodo.20200828
openalex publication_date 2026/05/15 · openalex created_date 2026/05/16 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
Nested similarity—the fact that some things are more alike than others—has a precise mathematical shape: the tree. When we measure distance on a tree by how recently two items shared a common branch, distance obeys a rule that ordinary distance does not: for any three items, the two largest distances are always equal (triadic matching). This rule, and the consequences that flow from it—that every point is its own center, that the scaffold dissolves leaving only relations, and that the tree generates both structure and narrative—appears across physics, biology, linguistics, history, and consciousness. The convergence is not an analogy. It is the same structure appearing at different scales—the simplest one known that can organize nested groupings without contradiction.