Epigenetic Teleonomy: A Stochastic Control Model of Environmental Signaling

Background: Epigenetic regulation must preserve stable functional states under molecular stochasticity and changing environments, yet an operational model linking context-level signals to measurable chromatin remodeling is limited. Method: This study proposes Epigenetic Teleonomy, a stochastic control framework in which epigenomic observables relax toward an empirically estimated within-subject baseline regime (reference distribution) with lagged mediator-driven inputs and feedback. Results: A local approximation yields mean-reverting dynamics. Simulations illustrate that without effective feedback, diffusion-like drift leads to increasing dispersion, whereas sufficient regulation gain yields bounded fluctuations and recovery. In the isotropic local Ornstein–Uhlenbeck (OU) regime, stationary fluctuations scale with effective diffusion and inversely with return rate (gain). Conclusion: The framework is testable in longitudinal designs by (i) estimating a subject-specific baseline from a stable run-in window, (ii) quantifying deviation using reduced-dimensional proxies, and (iii) fitting gain and diffusion from return-to-baseline statistics.