The Recursive Survival Law: Catastrophe as Adaptation

This paper formalizes the Recursive Survival Law, which proposes that catastrophe is not an exception but a fundamental feature of planetary evolution. Life on Earth demonstrates that extinction and renewal are feedback pulses within the same adaptive cycle. Each global disruption—volcanic winter, impact, or glaciation—forces reorganization of ecosystems, genetic diversity, and biogeochemical equilibrium, thereby enhancing planetary resilience.
The framework introduces five testable predictions concerning extinction feedbacks, entropy cycling, adaptive overcompensation, and the universality of recursion across planetary and stellar systems. It predicts that catastrophe frequency and intensity correlate with biospheric adaptability, forming a measurable pattern of recursive stability. This law situates disaster within the metabolism of living worlds, where collapse is not death but the renewal of complexity.