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It's far more concrete and makes testable predictions, for which I'm grateful. I still wouldn't agree with it.
We do have evidence of genetic selection pressures due to the environment: the best example that comes to mind is East Asians accumulating traits that increased conscientiousness and reduced neuroticism. That's fine, depending on how far you stretch things.
The issue is that hundreds of years pass between anything of note happening. Steppe raiders come and go, the concentration of wealth and population, and thus power hugs the same locations it always does.
Those are big ifs. Group selection is real, and cultural selection is faster than genes can dream of. It is fine to model things as better adapted communities/tribes/civilizations overrunning their less adept peers. The problem is when you're asked to show robust evidence that degree of environmental hardship correlates with wealth or military success. Wealthy, stable empires built around breadbaskets beat hardy frontier folk nine times out of ten. Devereaux’s blog has no end of specific examples, I've already recapitulated the evidence as pertains to Rome.
The US colonists only won against Britain by virtue of immense distance and logistical difficulties, and by the late 19th and early 20th century, they'd gone from being frontiersmen to living in a country with a comparable level to development to the best Europe had to offer, and then eclipsing them entirely shortly after. It is an open question if America has lost its edge, as of the time of writing it's the strongest nation on Earth. China is limited to projecting power in its own coastal waters, America rules the waves, and thus the world. There are no objective measures of decline, at least nothing with real stakes (I mean military stakes or dysfunction that can pluasibly lead to either foreign conquest or internal dissolution, not just growth disease or cultural stagnation. Rome survived multiple civil wars.)
But the crux of the issue is that you have to fit the model to historical events, and then show that it has predictive value (without training on the test). That is a high bar, and it is much easier to falsify than it is to prove. But it is also easy to postulate superficially plausible explanations for many things, the hard part is showing the relation to reality. You win some, you lose some.
I believe that Devereaux did a good job dissecting the specific flavor he dubbed Fremen Mirage, the version you propose makes fewer bold claims. That is an improvement, don't get me wrong, but you still need to demonstrate accuracy and predictive power. History is messy. It resists convenient narratives.
Respectfully, my version isn't making any kind of grand sweeping claims. We know what will happen if we leave a culture of bacteria on an petri dish with ample food and a zone of penicillin; the bacteria will eventually mutate into antibiotic resistance. This tells us nothing about what will happen on the scale of any individual bacteria.
I'd also point out that the original claim isn't that Weak Men Immediately With No Lead Time And Uniformly Make Hard Times, only that they do eventually. You can consider either the weak or strong aphorisms to lack sufficient predictive power to engage with, but vague isn't wrong, and my model doesn't try to claim what either you or Devereaux seem to expect it to.
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