Manuscript revision and pending experiment work, snapshot before restructuring

Clarity pass over the main text (36-item audit), Discussion rewrite and cut,
acknowledgements, Souly et al. as ref 62, lettered SI panels, model section
moved under Results; plus the untracked curriculum/society/compose/smol
configs, runners, figures, stats and tests that the SI already cites.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Y64o8FKP7rCuXzC48pxpMm

results/llm_merge_seeds_smol/README.md

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+# llm_merge_seeds_smol — the Fisher–Muller replication on a second base lineage (SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct)
+
+**Claim tested (manuscript revision 2026-09-12).** Every language-model result in the paper used one
+model lineage (Qwen2.5). Does "merged specialists exceed every parent" hold on an unrelated base?
+Base: `HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct` (Apache-2.0, Llama architecture, different lab and
+pretraining corpus). Identical protocol to `llm_merge_seeds` (three disjoint families, 600 training
+tasks, 3 epochs, rank-16 LoRA, fixed 100-task test sets, soup and TIES merges, 5 training seeds);
+`adapters_dir: models/llm_smol` keeps the specialist cache apart from Qwen's. Ran on one L40S in
+12 min (`hpc/llm_smol.pbs`). Numbers from `figures/stats_llm_smol.py`; figure `llm_smol.png` (both
+lineages side by side).
+
+### Result — replicates, 5/5 seeds, with the same magnitudes
+| contrast (SmolLM2) | overall | worst family |
+|---|---|---|
+| soup − best specialist | +0.049 ± 0.022 (5/5 seeds) | +0.190 ± 0.045 (5/5) |
+| TIES − best specialist | +0.097 ± 0.020 (5/5) | +0.202 ± 0.077 (5/5) |
+| *(Qwen2.5-0.5B, for reference)* soup − best | +0.040 ± 0.035 (4/5) | +0.200 ± 0.020 (5/5) |
+| *(Qwen)* TIES − best | +0.055 ± 0.020 (5/5) | +0.204 ± 0.016 (5/5) |
+
+Absolute levels: best specialist 0.610 ± 0.013 overall / 0.128 worst-family; soup 0.659 / 0.318;
+TIES 0.707 / 0.330. Falsifier (not triggered): merged ≤ best specialist in a majority of seeds.