I just think that the charge of evolutionary suboptimality matters much more to animals than to people. Animals are slaves to their life cycle and to their genetic impulses. People are not. True, we still have animal bodies, and we eat, breathe, and die. But the brain, language, and culture have obviously given us the potential to escape the fate of animal slaves. That’s what historical progress is about.

And this is the big picture that pits conservatives squarely against liberals since for all their theological hot air, the former implicitly deny that dichotomy between animals and people. They implicitly want us to live as animals, in terms of our societal command structures. Capitalism brings in the amoral evolutionary competition, and dominance hierarchies (minority oppression of the majority) reflect the stereotype of how most groups of social animal species are organized.

I agree that we can see the utility of evolutionary strategies, such as the division of labour between men and women. But those adaptations suited our Stone Age life as hunter-gatherers, not our breakout civilizations which have gone off the evolutionary rails. You keep wanting to say, “There’s nothing new to see here. Civilizations are the same old evolutionary sorting of winners and losers.” And I think that’s what Dennett called greedy reductionism (unless you want to posit meme theory or game theory to fill in the blank).

You say, “The Darwinian superiority of a norm as a social strategy is one factor in deciding whether any given norm is entrenched because it is a good norm.” I’m fine with that, but I think it takes you away from conservatism. I suspect you’ll say, with Burke, that conservatism is about balancing tradition against progress. So we can respect evolutionary norms without submitting to them in all contexts. And I’d say that the balancing act typically turns out to be disingenuous. The leading conservative loads the decision-making process to suit his or her conflict of interests as a member of the upper class. I doubt most conservatives weigh tradition against progress in good faith, although I suppose such weighing is logically possible.

You say we “evolved” past dominance and submission in gender roles, which is to say we evolved past patriarchy. Again, without getting into the substance of that separate issue, I think you’re in danger here of equivocating on “evolved.” “Evolved” can mean simply “gradually developed,” but Darwinism doesn’t control all kinds of gradual development. Some developments are non-Darwinian, which means natural selection isn’t a key factor in them. At best there’s a weak analogy between historical development of civil rights and the natural selection of species, an analogy that encourages the evolutionary psychologist’s or game theorist’s just-so stories.

I agree, of course, that things can change in evolution. Strategies that worked in the past may no longer work. But what I’m suggesting is that Darwinian thinking of society as a competition between winners and losers itself is obsolete in civilizations populated by people. At least, that’s what I’m saying is at issue in the conflict between liberals and conservatives (humanists and animalists).

I also agree that “dominance hierarchy” is vague, but I think the vagueness is due largely to the conservative’s stereotype of animal life. A meritocracy would indeed be hierarchical, but dominance implies that power is the primary driver in the class structure. In the wild, alphas dominate not just because they’re faster, stronger, or more vicious, but because they’re better at maintaining social alliances (like in the reality TV show “Survivor”).

But because leading conservatives have authoritarian or sadomasochistic personalities, they view evolution through that tinted lens. They see the alphas arbitrarily humiliating the submissive members of the pack, and they think human societies should work the same way (because these conservatives have a conflict of interest, being depraved members of the upper class). And for thousands of years, civilizations DID work that way (in monarchies, empires, slavery, and patriarchy), and that was the conservative’s treasured tradition.

Sure, good government good theoretically curb capitalistic incursions, but if democracy has certain inherent weaknesses, your point here might be like saying, “If science could only miraculously cure death, we wouldn’t have to die anymore.” Such improvements might be logically possible, but that doesn’t mean they’re practically so, given the powers we’re up against. Democracy and capitalism each have certain strengths and weaknesses, and their clashing may tend to favour capitalism. Likewise, we all die because the cells are adapted to weaken over time, or because evolution hasn’t conquered entropy. Science can’t work miracles, and neither can democracy.