Every generative system is a theory that has been made to run. The suite — mappa's planets, civ's ten millennia, polis's hinterlands, org's hierarchies — cannot simulate human development without asserting things about human development. Most simulations bury those assertions in constants nobody reads. This page digs them all up.
Each claim below is atomic: one assertion, the mechanic that implements it (the actual formula and constants, with the file it lives in), the lineage of real scholarship it rhymes with, and an honest label. consensus means the scholarship broadly agrees and we implemented it. contested means the field is genuinely split and the engine picked a side. stylized means a real regularity was compressed into one number that should not be quoted back as fact. invented means the claim is ours — a wager, a tractability move, or an aesthetic choice wearing a mechanic.
Three disciplines keep this catalogue honest. Claims are versioned: any change to a load-bearing claim changes what every permalink regenerates, so it must be declared as an engine epoch (epoch 1 → 67eee302, epoch 2 cities-as-actors → 3c9a4a61, epoch 3 agtech/water/fossil → 71a71f2f) — the pinned hash in CI is the claims ledger's checksum. Names are never causes: everything presentational is excluded from the hash, so a claim either moves the numbers or it isn't a claim. And nothing here is scripted: the engine has no era switch, no event queue, no destiny — every claim is a local rule whose consequences we discover by running it, same as you.
node mappa/civ/test/civ.selftest.mjs), change the constant, and watch what history it makes. If your version is better, it ships as an epoch. That is the entire epistemology of this project: the claims are falsifiable in the only sense a generative system allows — run both, compare the worlds.