I see, for example, how carefully you choose your words in speaking of the entrenchment of standard gender roles in childhood due to the nature of social competition. Your reasoning is evolutionary and therefore non-normative. You’re talking about the probability of winners and losers in a social sorting process, not about whether patriarchy is better than feminist egalitarianism.

I don't think that's right. I have no interest in "social sorting." Yes, my reasoning is Darwinian, but it is very much normative and not at all hierarchical. I'm not talking about winners and losers. I am talking about norms that survive and norms that don't.

I am very much asserting that the one-breadwinner, nuclear family is better than any alternative in our current state of industrialization and technology. I am enough of a libertarian to believe that gender roles should not be legally enforced, but I do think they implement a better societal strategy than egalitarianism; the social current should therefore flow with them rather than against them.

On another point, I think your focus on the drives of the elites is misplaced. Think about about the characters in search of an author, the worker with no entrepreneurial skill in search of someone to organize his efforts. That's what the law of oligarchy is about as applied to humans. We are mostly not alphas. Hell, we are mostly gammas. We provide whatever rewards need to be negotiated in order to find a competent boss willing to tell us where to show up and what to do so that we can go home and buy useful products. That is a survival strategy of the masses as much as it is the domination strategy of the elites.

I get the sense that by "conservatism" and "liberalis" you mean callousness and empathy. Red in tooth and claw vs. kumbaya. That distinction doesn't work for me.

[Sorry for the two comments. Feel free to treat them as one.]