Well, I took you to be presupposing a normative story because your initial comment spoke of "making here the best place we can make it for ourselves."
But you say you're only intending to be descriptive. So you're saying we evolve the ability to cooperate or to otherwise avoid winner-take-all scenarios, and we rationalize that ability with theological speculations about rights and such.
Yet in so far as your explanation entails that economic growth is beneficial, I don't see how your explanation would be based on natural selection. We evolved to prefer the nomadic, egalitarian conditions that prevailed in most of the Stone Age. That's as far as natural selection goes with us.
Now you say we evolved the ability to recognize patterns, which enables us to see the wisdom of game theory, which allows us in turn to appreciate the benefits of economic growth. So the advantage of economic growth is grounded ultimately on evolution.
Alas, that strikes me as a pretty clear case of special pleading. You dismiss the special sciences or humanities that conflict with your preferences as "theologies" for identifying emergent patterns, and you favor reductive sociology or whatever else hews more closely to a social Darwinian scenario. If it's all just pattern recognition, why shouldn't we recognize the environmentalist's pattern of the ultimate self-destructiveness of expansive capitalist societies?
You say that societies that don't prefer growth strategies perish. That's a short-term pattern. Is there some reason we should be blind to the longer-term pattern in which the expansive, consumerist economies appear to be unsustainable?
You concede that economic growth might be unsustainable. But wouldn't we have to conquer spaceflight and live off-world in the long run, because the planet's resources aren't infinite? Why should those utopian speculations be respected more than the theologies you dismiss? Again, that seems like special pleading.
I'm surprised you doubt that fraud is as prevalent as I suggest. Your psychological talk of pattern recognition entails that virtually every one of our models is an illusion, as is every ceteris paribus law. We focus on some regularities only by ignoring others. Our concepts and models are thus idealizations, which is to say they're simplifications and thus distortions of reality. Yes, some are more useful than others. But they all make for frauds (self-deceptions) when we cling to them too tightly. I wrote about this in my article on racism.
In any case, you say the means matter less than the ends. What matters is optimality. So if mass frauds (noble lies, etc) make for the most optimal society, you'd be fine with that. And optimality would have to be defined in the neoclassical fashion which ignores "externalities" like the holocausts perpetrated by the Anthropocene. That's actually a fine example of fraud in the form of self-deception: we focus on some patterns only by ignoring others. And our tribal instinct is to zealously defend our illusions while demonizing opposing ones as mere theologies.
