# E11 — the dynamic Lamarckian society: the vertical claim (C3)

**Claim tested.** The culmination. Everything before was a *single operator*; the society's
load-bearing, un-preempted claim is that composing them makes **general capability climb over
generations while specialties are re-earned**, and that **every operator is necessary** — remove one
and it breaks. This is blueprint C3, the "vertical."

**Setup.** A finite population of `N=60` agents (genotypes of `L=12` biallelic loci) evolves on a
**rugged Kauffman NK landscape** (`K=8`) that *is* reality. Each generation composes: grounding,
**directed recombination (sex)**, **quality-diversity selection**, and mutation. Grounding is made
load-bearing by the **consensus-conformity (self-consumption)** mechanism — selection acts on
`g·true_fitness + (1−g)·conformity`, where conformity = agreement with the population's own consensus,
so at `g=0` the society optimises fitting-the-crowd rather than reality. A 4-arm ablation, 12
replicate landscapes, 80 generations.

### Symbols
- **agent** = a model (a genotype); **reality** = the NK fitness landscape; **grounding `g`** = share of the selection signal that is real fitness vs conformity.
- **directed sex** = recombine many parents + keep the fittest offspring (E10). **quality-diversity** = select for capability *and* novelty, so specialties persist.
- **conformity − true fitness** = how far the population's mutual agreement exceeds its real capability (the self-consumption "delusion" signature).

### The three panels (over generations)
1. **The vertical climb.** Best real capability: the **full society (green) climbs to the global
   optimum** (≈0.78 of 0.79), while **no_grounding (red) collapses** to a fit-looking but poor
   consensus (0.48). `no_sex` and `no_diversity` plateau *below* the full society.
2. **Specialties maintained.** Population diversity: the **full society explores longest** (diversity
   decays slowly as it searches), while every ablation collapses diversity fast — `no_grounding`
   almost immediately.
3. **Self-consumption signature.** Conformity minus true fitness: **largest for `no_grounding`** — the
   population strongly *agrees* while being *wrong*, the signature of training on its own consensus.

### Takeaway — every operator is load-bearing
- **full** → climbs to the optimum with diversity maintained. **The vertical claim.**
- **no_grounding** → self-consumption collapse to an unfit consensus (train on the crowd → regress to a confident, wrong mean).
- **no_sex** → can't recombine complementary specialists to escape local optima → plateaus below full.
- **no_diversity (greedy)** → collapses diversity fastest, gets stuck at a *worse* local optimum.

This integrates the whole study — E1–E6 (collapse/grounding/selection), the learning kernel, and
E7–E10 (sexual transmission) — into one system, and shows the Lamarckian society needs **all** of
grounding + directed sex + diversity to climb without collapsing. On a rugged landscape you need
diversity to explore basins, sex to recombine them, and grounding to select on reality; remove any and
you fail differently. **Falsifier (not triggered):** if any ablation had matched the full society, or
the full society had failed to exceed every ablation, the integration claim would fail.