I think Remarkl is more pragmatic than that. I'm still trying to understand his (or her?) perspective, and I've been trying off and on now for many months. But I think he'd be fine with "whatever works," as opposed to imposing some dogmas that aren't broadly agreed to. His point about blue laws is that they might work regardless of their point of origin, so we shouldn't stereotype them with the genetic fallacy.

What I'm trying to understand is whether workability here amounts to an implicit appeal to metaphysical teleology. Does a social evolutionist have to appeal to niches or to ecological opportunities of interaction to explain how competitions reach a point of optimality? What's the difference between such opportunities that make certain agreements probable, and Aristotelian proper functions or purposes?

If we strip away all the normativity from game-theoretic competitions, and thus all the quasi-Aristotelian teleology, we'd have just a mechanistic, evolutionary account of how things got where they are. I don't see why such an evolutionary perspective would be essential to conservatism, when you could explain just as well how liberalism evolved. It looks like a red herring. Remarkl's fixated on a meta-perspective of all changes (possibly even of nonliving things).