Living Structures
Structures that may hold themselves together — genuine recursions, right of Line 1 on the taxonomy. Most sit in the recursive middle (base, coordination); a few are candidate sovereign attractors (§ 7.2). Laid out by the scale of life they model.
The gallery is a grid. Down the page run the scales of biology, from a reaction closing a loop on itself, up to lineages persisting while they vary. Across it runs the framework's one question: did the structure produce its own order, or was that order handed to it? Every simulation lands in one cell of this grid, so the gallery can branch across all of biology without losing its shape.
A card's scale (which band it sits in) is plain description, what the simulation models. A card's column (living vs supplied) is an authored intent, a teaching device, not a measurement. What you can trust in any panel is the run itself: does the basin recover, or rupture? A certified sovereignty verdict is not claimed here.
Molecular · autocatalytic
can a reaction set close a self-reproducing loop?Belousov reaction–diffusion
An excitable chemical medium that organizes into travelling waves and spirals, the existing Belousov-Kernel lineage.
Autocatalytic set
A → B → C → A, each step catalyzed by the next, a loop that makes more of itself. Cut the feed and watch it starve. Runnable now.
Cellular · membrane
can a boundary hold a distinction against diffusion?Turing morphogenesis
The theory of reaction–diffusion patterning, how a uniform field breaks into stable spots and stripes. A tribute page with a downstream RAPT reading; not a runnable panel. For a live reaction–diffusion sim, see the Belousov series above.
Self-maintaining membrane
A boundary that repairs itself faster than it diffuses away. The 1974 artificial chemistry in which a chain closes around a catalyst, decays continuously, and is rebuilt from substrate it lets through. Read closely, including the rule its authors left out of the paper. Not a runnable panel.
The Shape of a Rule
A closed sheet of 642 cells, joined by springs and filled with a fixed volume. A local rule sets how long each cell's springs want to be and how sharply it wants to bend, and the whole body takes a different shape under each of four rules. Switch the rule off and the body falls back to a plain cup. Runnable now.
Organismal · developmental
can a body-plan grow and hold its form?Growth & repair
A form that grows to a target shape and restores it after damage, morphology as a maintained attractor. Cut it with the canvas or amputate half, and watch whether the boundary returns. Runnable now.
Population · ecological
can interacting populations orbit a shared basin?Tri-Trophic Stack
Producer → herbivore → predator on a Duncan lattice. The populations are the basin; the sliders perturb it; watch it recover or rupture. Runnable now.
The Modeled Economy
The same three levels, and a finite pool of matter every one of them has to pay from. The only panel here where persistence is not free, and the only one whose pyramid is an outcome rather than a setting. Runnable now.
Predator–prey
Two-level cycles, the classic oscillating basin, the simpler cousin of the tri-trophic stack.
Competition
Two producers, one resource, coexistence or exclusion as a basin question.
Community · evolutionary
can lineages persist while they vary?Mutation & selection
A lineage that copies itself with errors and is held together by selection. Eigen's quasispecies, read through a two-genotype simplification and two competition experiments, including the result that a population can outlive its own identity. Not a runnable panel.
Sovereign structures
which of these provably pay their own way?Reserved
The column for structures the instrument can certify as self-producing, not merely surviving. It stays empty until the measurement is earned, and that emptiness is the honest reading, shown rather than hidden.
The rest of the axis: Attractlets →, left of Line 1, non-recursive order handed in from outside; and False Basins →, off the axis entirely, patterns that look basin-like but pull nothing home.
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