Your analysis seems to make metaphysics out of game theory and its categories of strategies, payoffs, costs, optimality, workability, and games. If that analysis does apply to physics, cosmology, and the evolution of molecules and star systems, nature itself becomes a game, which commits you, I think, to something like Aristotelian teleology. If natural systems are literally following strategies to minimize costs and to maximize optimality, that’s their purpose, which would typically be taken to entail an intelligent designer.

If there’s no such literal application of game theory throughout nature (in physics, chemistry, and even in the evolution of lower animal species), this isn’t metaphysics you’re engaged in, but storytelling. You’re drawing an analogy from certain special cases involving the calculations of thinking creatures (who alone could be literally playing a game), and you’re overextending that analogy to all natural changes.

What interests me here is that this is the length a conservative may have to go to avoid the charge of social Darwinism.

Now, that charge differs from your mischaracterization of it. My talk of this Darwinism doesn’t entail any meritocracy. I don’t say conservatives are committed to the view that the boss deserves to be in charge. On the contrary, I said this is a type of political realism, which means that morality is illusory. “Might makes right” means there’s really no such thing as right. For the social Darwinian, “right” is just a euphemism for speaking of physical, political, or economic dominance.

Again, it’s animalists vs humanists. For the former, there’s as much morality in human affairs as there is in the animal kingdom, because there’s no essential difference between life in the wild and life in civilization. Their rhetoric notwithstanding, I’m saying that for conservatives, personhood itself—in the modern humanist’s sense—is a hubristic delusion, a sin against God/Nature.