"At the persistence layer there is only selection" is true by construction once "persistence layer" names the slice that already has variants, differential recurrence, and a specified filter. The last section bounds the claim to where a specified filter operates; the title and thesis still print the unbounded form.

§IV says naming the desired trait does not make contribution to it receive reproductive weight; exams select passing scores. §II's table still maps Science to theories, Markets to firms, and AI Safety to architectures as "tested mappings," while the caption calls each row a hypothesis to test. The row labels are the named traits; the actual filters are unspecified.

The abundance inversion is specified as comfort immediately rewarded, recurrence tracking it, and delayed costs weakly fed back. Those conditions already describe a comfort-favoring filter, so abundance is not doing causal work. The same missing cut treats transfer systems as feedback-severance by type while listing bankruptcy as good medium-cost artificial selection; both reduce the cost of failure.

The Fourth Branch is named as the keeper that couples copy rules to flourishing. The keeper is itself a variant under some filter. Naming that office does not, by the page's own rule, make contribution to flourishing receive reproductive weight. Flourishing is packed with aliveness-as-passing-the-filter unless competence, truth, and capability have a measure that can fail while the keeper still scores.