Cognitive Biology Across Phyla: One Bioelectric Operator, Many Body Plans, and the Substrate-Reader That Sets the Boundary

This paper uses the Cognitive Biology paradigm to explore the generation of phenotypes from genomes across several phyla. It tests whether the same machinery extends across the animal tree, and reports two results that locate which part of the framework is universal and which part is clade-bound. The bioelectric floor is clade-universal and the genomic kernel is not universal, because its reader is not. It treats holometabolous metamorphosis—one genome building a larval body and then an adult body—not as an anomaly but as the clearest demonstration of the framework’s central claim. Finally it demonstrates the derivation of the Nematostella, Capitella and Planaria body plans from their genomes.