Descendants and Behavioral Inheritance
A descendant can inherit capability, style, bias, shortcut, or vulnerability even when its new hash and model card look distinct.
Mechanism
Variation, evaluation, selection, inheritance, and succession can exist as properties of the broader development process. The model does not need to rewrite itself at runtime. The ecology changes because operators, pipelines, routers, and release controllers alter the population.
Assurance implication
A descendant needs fresh evidence for safety-relevant behavior. A content hash can identify an artifact, but it cannot prove that a related descendant preserved all relevant guardrails.
Review question
What behavior is being tracked, where could it be encoded, which descendants or reservoirs may carry it, and what evidence would count as absence across active compositions?