Finite-batch selection between inherited chemical states under a shared limiting resource
Abstract
A chemical difference between compartments can change how fast they grow without changing how many compartments of each kind there are: in an asynchronously dividing population, accumulated size and offspring number are out of phase. We prove a quantitative finite-batch enrichment theorem for an explicit four-species count reaction network in which every compartment grows by drawing on one shared finite precursor pool while its resident feeds and removal channels remain maintained. Starting from any high-state and low-state newborns in explicit, nonempty, chemically certified regions around two stationary compositions, the high-state cell-count odds at the nutrient hitting time exceed by the deadline , except on an event of probability at most , with all three terms explicit. At and the error is at most with , and a sharper retained bound is . No fitness parameter is imposed: the growth advantage is the certified difference in resident concentration of the growth species, and chemical fidelity of every descendant is proved rather than assumed. The proof combines a size-position exponential that controls chemical recovery across divisions without any recovery clock, ancestral size totals that survive complementary division unchanged, and a single finite stopped law under which all failure branches are bounded without independence assumptions. For two founders the success event forces a high-state frequency of at least . The finite stopped-law theorem and its quantitative consequences are verified in Lean 4; the identification with an ongoing nonexplosive count process up to the stopping event is a conventional localization argument. The copy numbers for which the bound is informative are astronomically large, and the result is a theorem about a specified effective model, not an experimental calibration.