The problem as computer science states it
Access control, policy enforcement and data governance all degrade under composition. A policy attached to a dataset does not survive the dataset being joined, transformed, aggregated or used to train a model. Provenance systems record what happened; they do not enforce what may happen next. After a few generations of derivation, the governing conditions are unrecoverable in practice, which is why regulated data cannot be recombined even when every individual permission would allow it.
Why the substrate made it unsolvable
Governance was treated as metadata attached to an object rather than as a property inherited by it. Metadata can be stripped, lost or ignored, and enforcement therefore requires an authority that inspects. At scale, across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries, no such authority can exist — which is the same reason Coase's monitoring costs are high.
What the paradigm supplies
The import is the organizational hierarchy of molecular biology, and it is exact rather than metaphorical. Genes encode function; DNA is the medium copied with high fidelity; genomes are the complete set; and regulatory genes control which genes are expressed in which context, which is why one genome yields a liver cell and a neuron. Inheritance is not only vertical: horizontal gene transfer and symbiogenesis produce inheritance from multiple unrelated lineages at once, which is the biological precedent for a derivative inheriting from thousands of inputs across domains and jurisdictions.
The architecture exceeds biology in one respect that matters. Biological inheritance is Darwinian: acquired characteristics are not transmitted. Governance inheritance here is Lamarckian, because a condition acquired during a resource's operational life — a consent withdrawn, a term amended, a jurisdiction changed — propagates to every derivative already created from it. That is a categorical advance with no precedent in the source discipline, and it is what makes governance enforceable across heterogeneous regulatory contexts simultaneously.
A demonstration that the primitive does not provide the properties claimed, or that prior work already provides them.
Molecular biology's organizational hierarchy · Lamarckian inheritance · Horizontal gene transfer