s4h-evolution-variation-selection

s4h-evolution-variation-selection is a skill for Claude Code from human-avatar/skills-for-humanity. It costs 75 tokens per session (2,022 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A way to study how groups of different strategies or features change over repeated rounds. It looks at what varies, what the environment rewards, and what successful approaches get kept or copied.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to analyse changing product features, business strategies, organisational practices, cultural ideas, or other sets of competing alternatives.
Why use it?
It helps explain why some approaches spread while others disappear, without assuming that change is deliberately moving toward an ideal result. It separates experimentation from the conditions that select winners.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the skills-for-humanity plugin — 197 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it to analyse changing product features, business strategies, organisational practices, cultural ideas, or other sets of competing alternatives.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-evolution-variation-selection
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add human-avatar/skills-for-humanity --skill s4h-evolution-variation-selection
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skills-for-humanity, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 197 skills, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for s4h-evolution-variation-selection

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-evolution-variation-selection/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-evolution-variation-selection)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-evolution-variation-selection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-evolution-variation-selection/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for s4h-evolution-variation-selection

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-evolution-variation-selection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-evolution-variation-selection.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 75 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,022 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to low

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • low Excessive Agency · line 56
    Skill's behavior or capabilities extend beyond its stated purpose. Scope creep allows an agent to perform actions unrelated to its documented functionality, increasing the attack surface.
    Fix: Limit the skill's scope to its documented purpose. Remove instructions that enable the agent to perform actions outside its stated functionality.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00075 $0.02022
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.01011
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00404
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00202

Measured 9d ago against content hash 54c1d0e53ff5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

s4h-evolution-variation-selection scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/s4h-evolution-variation-selection/SKILL.md · 136 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 136 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Evolution: Variation-Selection

Darwin's central insight was not about progress — it was about fit. Populations change not because individuals strive toward an ideal but because variants that happen to be better suited to current conditions leave more descendants. The population shifts toward fitness not through intention but through differential survival and reproduction. Evolution is a filter, not a designer.

This tool applies the variation-selection-retention triad to any evolving system: biological populations, business strategy portfolios, cultural practices, product features, organisational structures, or ideas spreading through a community. Whenever there is a population of variants, a selection environment that differentially rewards some over others, and a mechanism by which successful variants are retained or replicated — evolution is happening. The analysis asks: what is varying, what is the selection pressure, what is being retained, and what does the population look like after several rounds?

Richard Dawkins extended Darwin's logic beyond genes to any replicating entity with heritable variation — memes, strategies, cultural norms. The triad is substrate-independent: wherever variation + selection + retention operate, populations evolve. The question is always which variants win in this environment, not which are best in the abstract.


Your Process

Step 1: Define the Population and the Entity Identify what is being evolved. What are the entities in this population — the variants being compared? Be precise: not "companies" but "pricing strategies in use by companies in this market." Define the time horizon over which evolution is being observed: one product cycle, ten years, a generation.

Framing check: Confirm the population and time horizon before continuing. State what you've identified — the specific entities being varied, the time scale, and the outcome space — in one sentence, then use AskUserQuestion:

  • Question: "I'm reading this as: [your one-sentence framing — what the population is, what varies, and over what time horizon]. Is that right?"
  • Header: "Framing"
  • Options:
    • Yes — proceed — framing is correct
    • Adjust — one element is off; user will correct it before you continue
    • Reframe — different situation than read; incorporate the correction before proceeding

Read the full file on GitHub · 136 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 136 lines · 75 tokens per session scan A 54c1d0e53ff5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

s4h-evolution-variation-selection is a skill published in the GitHub repository human-avatar/skills-for-humanity (223 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 75 tokens to every session and 2,022 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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