Mortality as the Generative Force of Adaptive Intelligence: From Causal Chain to Drive Architecture

We present two complementary experiments demonstrating that mortality is a generative force in theevolution of adaptive behavior. In Experiment 1, we isolate five links in a causal chain created by mortality: energy depletion creates eating behavior, perception enables food-seeking, reproduction is necessaryfor species persistence, inheritance creates cumulative adaptation, and brain complexity increases overevolutionary time. All five links pass controlled tests with 10 independent seeds each (6/6 metrics). InExperiment 2, we implement a mortality-constrained drive architecture inspired by the biological limbicsystem—comprising hunger, pain, fear, pleasure, and curiosity—and show that agents with this architecture outsurvive standard evolved agents by 9% in a complex seasonal environment with injury cascadedynamics. Three drives (hunger, pain, curiosity) produce consistent, directional behavioral modulation.Fear produces strong but varied responses (fight, flight, freeze), consistent with the biological diversity offear reactions. Together, these results support the thesis that mortality creates the foundational chain ofadaptive life and that a mortality-constrained internal drive architecture produces qualitatively differentand quantitatively superior survival behavior compared to approaches lacking this foundation.