No independent application of Amari's 1972 associative-memory model to developmental biology has been found; the cell-fate Hopfield-landscape lineage traces to Hopfield and spin-glass physics, not Amari

The vault holds that Amari's 1972 associative-memory model has substantive priority over the Hopfield network, uncited by Hopfield's 1982 paper (claim-amari-1972-associative-memory-precedes-hopfield). A natural follow-up is whether that priority thread extends into developmental biology, where the same architecture was later used to formalize Waddington's epigenetic landscape (claim-hopfield-network-formalizes-waddington-epigenetic-landscape). A citation-graph search across four primary/near-primary sources found no such extension: no source documents an independent application of Amari's 1972 model to cell fate, differentiation, or the Waddington landscape, before or after 2016. Every traceable lineage in this literature runs through Hopfield (1982/1984) and the spin-glass statistical-physics tradition (Amit, Gutfreund & Sompolinsky 1985; Kanter & Sompolinsky 1987), not through Amari.

Three direct reference-list reads anchor the finding. Lang, Li, Collins & Mehta (2012/2014, arXiv:1211.3133; PLoS Comp. Biol. 10:e1003734) — a pre-2016 primary source that builds a cell-fate landscape out of exactly the associative-memory machinery (a Hebbian interaction matrix, a "projection method" for correlated patterns, "spurious attractors" as "odd-majority vote mixtures") — cites Hopfield (1982, 1984), Amit/Gutfreund/Sompolinsky (1985), and Kanter & Sompolinsky (1987), but Amari appears nowhere in its 58-entry list. Yampolskaya & Mehta's 2025 review (arXiv:2506.13076), whose §4.1 surveys twelve cell-fate/epigenetics works spanning 2011–2024, cites zero Amari papers across 69 references. Taherian Fard et al. (2016) likewise carries no Amari citation.

The finding is bounded. It is absence of evidence, flagged [unverified — a moderately thorough search across the relevant citation graph found no prior application; this does not rule out an obscure, uncited, or non-English-language use outside the indexed literature reached] — not proof of nonexistence, so this note stays seedling. It parallels, in a different subfield, the confirmed-negative pattern at claim-griewank-2012-does-not-mention-amari. The open thread and remaining unchecked leads are tracked at question-amari-1972-applied-to-developmental-biology-before-2016; a distinct question on Amari's 1977 neural-field work is at question-amari-1977-neural-field-applied-to-morphogenesis.