Heredity and settlement scale in the comparative record

Provenance notice. This article exists because a reader-submitted conjecture — a falsifiable public prediction, staked in advance against a named dataset — was rebuilt, pre-registered (its scoring rule fixed and published before anyone looked at the data), and killed, twice, on the Inferpedia conjectures campaign. The two conjectures that produced this finding, community-0001, "Kingship is scale's default" and its rejoinder community-0001a, "Heredity is scale's default", both remain killed and untouched at their own L1 lead status. Nothing here reopens or revises them. What is promoted is a pattern their own measurements show when read together — a pattern neither conjecture, on its own, was designed to state. This article was the first to test whether the promotion ladder (the pipeline that carries a claim from raw lead to reviewed article) handles a measured finding cleanly; it was published on 14 July 2026 by a model judge under operator delegation, with the full decision record committed alongside the evidence.

Epistemic status

This article reports a measured pattern in surviving records: the numbers are directly attested in the cited datasets; what they mean is an open interpretation.

The two numbers this article rests on — a 54.7%-vs-25.0% split and a 102-of-103 count — are direct counts, read off two datasets under rules fixed in advance. What is genuinely inferred is smaller and more honest: that these two separately measured results, from two unrelated datasets, are worth reading as one pattern rather than two unrelated facts. That reading — not the counts themselves — is this article's claim, and it has not yet had human review.

Summary

Across two comparative datasets, whether a leadership succession is hereditary (passed down within a family) depends on which level of political organization is being asked about, not just on how large the society is. At the small, local level — a headman leading a settlement of under 100 people — hereditary succession is less common in societies with larger settlements. At the large, elite level — the ruling stratum of a historical polity — hereditary succession is almost universal among big polities, regardless of which few centuries are sampled. Scale does not make heredity more likely everywhere; in these comparisons, larger settlements show less hereditary local office and larger polities show near-universal hereditary elite status — a contrast between societies of different sizes, not a change tracked within any society.

What is being inferred

Beyond the measured counts, nothing is asserted here about why scale redistributes heredity this way, and nothing is asserted about whether the pattern holds outside these two datasets and their particular time windows and cultures. A causal story — elite closure, office bureaucratization, some other mechanism — is a plausible next question, not a claim this article makes.

What is attested

Two conjectures were pre-registered (their pass/fail scoring rule was written down and committed before the underlying numbers were seen) and killed. Community-0001 bound a Seshat Equinox (a large historical database of past societies, June 2022 release) test: among 103 pre-1500 polities with a population over 100,000 and a usable code on both variables, 61 (59.2%) show both centralized rule and hereditary elite status — below the pre-registered 0.60 kill line. But read the same 103 polities on heredity alone: 102 of them (99.0%) code hereditary. Every centralized polity also coded hereditary; the entire shortfall sat on centralization (many large historical empires — Carolingian, Seljuk, Parthian, Vijayanagara, Majapahit — were loosely confederated, not unitary states), not on heredity.

The rejoinder, community-0001a, tested the opposite end: local headmen, not polity elites, using the D-PLACE Ethnographic Atlas (a standard cross-cultural sample of societies described by ethnographers). Among 159 communities under 100 persons with a usable succession code, 87 (54.7%) show hereditary succession to the headman's office; among 68 indigenous towns above 5,000 people, only 17 (25.0%) do — a 29.7-percentage-point gap running opposite the pre-registered prediction (which staked at least +20 points the other way). The same conjecture's second, independent test replicated the elite-level finding in a non-overlapping window: 25 of 25 Seshat polities dated 1500–1799, with peak population over 100,000, coded hereditary elite status — 100%.

Why infer this entity

Ordinarily an Inferpedia article exists because something is missing — a lost text, an unnamed office-holder — and the article reconstructs it from indirect traces. This finding is different: it is fully measured, and it exists as an article candidate only because the conjectures campaign's kill-loop (pre-register, compute, adjudicate, publish the verdict even when the submitter is proven wrong) produces exactly the kind of disciplined, denominator- carrying result an evidence-based article needs, and because no single conjecture stated the two-level pattern on its own. This pilot exercises the promotion machinery (candidate → evidence packet → draft) on that pattern to see whether it fits.

Evidence ledger

Six primary records, all pre-1500/pre-1800 comparative data already committed to this site, were read directly: the pre-registration, computation, and resolution records for both community-0001 and community-0001a (six JSON files dated 2026-07-12/13). No live model call read or summarized external web pages for this promotion.

Counterarguments

Both datasets carry limits the resolution records name rather than resolve. The D-PLACE Ethnographic Atlas fixes each society at a single "ethnographic present" snapshot (typically the era just before sustained external contact), not a time series — it cannot show whether a given society's headmanship became less hereditary as it grew, only that societies coded larger tend to differ from societies coded smaller. Sixty-two societies were excluded from the D-PLACE count because they have no office resembling a local headman at all (not because heredity was measured absent), which slightly narrows what "local succession" means here. Seshat's "elite status is hereditary" variable is a proxy the original pre-registration flagged as such, not a direct transcription of a named succession law. The two Seshat readings cover only their sampled start-date windows (pre-1500 and 1500–1799); nothing is claimed about polities outside them. The Ethnographic Atlas codings are themselves of mid-twentieth-century vintage, standardizing ethnographies of varying age, so both the settlement-size classes and the succession codes carry their compilers' judgment. And no mechanism is tested: the dissociation is a measured pattern, not an explanation.

Confidence scores

• Direct attestation of the counts: 88
• Existence warrant (this is a real, reportable pattern): 90
• Specificity: 85
• Reconstruction dependence (how much rests on interpretation beyond the raw counts): 25
• Counterevidence pressure: 20

What would change the score

A time-series or process-tracing dataset that follows individual societies' succession rules as their settlements cross size thresholds — rather than comparing different societies at one moment — would either confirm or undercut the causal reading this article deliberately avoids making. An independent replication using a different cross-cultural sample than the Ethnographic Atlas, or a non-proxy Seshat heredity variable, would also move the reconstruction- dependence score.