Conserving Coherence Under Constraint

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 4 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 4 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Organisms often respond to energy constraints, time pressure, or imminent threat by limiting behavioral options, lowering metabolic demands, and increasing their level of coordinated action. Although these responses can be viewed as an impairment, we propose that they can be adaptive responses which occur as the costs of coordinating complexity exceed an organism’s capabilities at any given time. Accordingly, selection favors mechanisms that conserve the coherence of function by reducing the number of control inputs and reorganizing coupling among the components that remain. We propose that these transitions share a diagnostic signature that encompasses reduced degrees of freedom, reorganized coupling, and stabilization of protected variables. We formalize this as a capacity–demand framework and articulate four named, testable hypotheses that specify when and how simplification and recovery should occur across biological scales. This perspective generates testable predictions about threshold-driven emergency modes, asymmetric recovery from emergency modes, and anthropogenic disturbance driving the simplification of function. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2XD38 Life Sciences adaptive simplification, energetic constraint, dormancy, torpor, collective behavior, energetic constraint, dormancy, torpor, collective behavior, tonic immobility, regime shift, coherence, dimensionality reduction Published: 2026-03-10 13:24 Last Updated: 2026-04-23 08:32 CC-By Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: None Data and Code Availability Statement: Not applicable. This is a theoretical review article; no new data were generated or analyzed. Language: English