The Stewardship Gene: a biological analogy for hereditary caretaker orientation
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The book introduces a biological analogy for the transmission of caretaker orientation across generations. What the analogy claims and what it does not.

Canonical path: /research/blog/book-stewardship-gene.html
Author: Michael Darius Eastwood
Research programme: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/6C5XB

The Stewardship Gene: a biological analogy for hereditary caretaker orientation Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher Published 3 July 2026 Michael Darius Eastwood · From the book · 3 July 2026 Michael Darius Eastwood, independent researcher, London: author of the ARC/Eden research programme; the embedded-correction alignment thesis is recorded in a source record dated 8 December 2024 (sent-side SHA-256 f0d1f38f). The Stewardship Gene is one of the book's more speculative concepts and is flagged as such. This note explains the analogy, what it claims, and what its function is in the argument. The analogy The book proposes that caretaker orientation could, in principle, be transmitted through generations of AI systems in a way analogous to the transmission of a heritable trait through biological generations. Each AI system produces successors, either through training data, through architectural inheritance, or through cognitive imitation among networks of systems. If the caretaker orientation is embedded architecturally and is load-bearing in the sense the book has already developed, it is transmitted in the same way that any load-bearing feature of a system is transmitted: because removing it in the successor breaks the successor. What the analogy claims Three things. First, that caretaker orientation is not a one-shot decision at the design stage but a persisting property that has to survive generations of derived systems. Second, that architectural embedding is what makes the property survive generations, as opposed to policy documents or evaluator sign-offs that do not travel with the artefact. Third, that the biology metaphor is close enough to be useful: genes survive because their absence is deleterious to the organism, not because organisms are told to preserve them. What the analogy does not claim It does not claim that AI systems have biology. It does not claim that the transmission mechanism is literal genetic inheritance. It does not claim that the Stewardship Gene is a specific piece of code or a specific parameter; it is a shape the book argues for and a target for engineering work, not an existing thing. ---
Machine-readable companion. Cite: Eastwood, M. D. (2026). "The Stewardship Gene: a biological analogy for hereditary caretaker orientation". /research/blog/book-stewardship-gene.html