I agree with your other critisising points but I think presumptions (2) and (3) make sense somewhat. It's safe to assume that for any self-replicating life evo

I agree with your other critisising points but I think presumptions (2) and (3) make sense somewhat. It's safe to assume that for any self-replicating life evolution takes place, universally. The genes (no matter on their biological implementation) are always evaluated by one fitness function only – whether they succeed in spreading around. Life isn't optimised for surviving per se, but it is optimised for replicating. The same in a way applies for civilisations. The ones that are bad at expanding are massively outexpanded/outnumbered by the ones that are good at expanding. Unless expanding fundamentally always leads to civilisation's downfall (but I don't see how it would?)