It seems to me that on lesswrong there is an overemphasis on status as a human motivator. For example, I think it's possible for a scientist to want to make an important discovery not to gain status in the scientific community but for the beauty of knowledge.

I think you miss the point of how status is related to motivation. Relatively few people actually think "I want status and so I will do X". Instead, they just actually want to do X because that is what they feel like doing. However when we wish to model or predict how humans will behave the status concept is powerful. "What would we expect people to do in this situation assuming they were optimized to do what would work to gain social status in their environment of adaptation?" often gives good predictions of what people will do.

Note that people's feelings and desires being real and sincere does not make a behavior less about status. Likewise, a behavior being about status does not make feelings and desires less 'real'.

"Possible" is not a refutation of a general statement, only of an absolute one.

Rather, I suspect the emphasis is to compensate for nerds of various sorts - that being who makes up most of the LessWrong audience - placing far less emphasis on status than most people, thus failing to understand the overwhelming power of tribal politics in almost every human interaction.

Remember: we grew this great big brain just to do tribal politics. We grew general intelligence as a better way to do tribal politics. We discovered quantum mechanics and built a huge technological civilisation as side-effects of a mechanism to do tribal politics better. So I'd say that stuff is likely important to dealing effectively with other people, i.e., winning.

Good question, though :-)

I'm unsure of whether it is overused. However, I'm not convinced that the heavy emphasis on status pays much of its rent. What do the overarching status hypotheses predict that we would expect not to see if they weren't the case?

It's certainly possible, but that doesn't mean that status isn't a powerful motivator, and one which we're far more likely to underestimate.

The "hammer that makes you see all problems as nails" bit is a description I've used myself though, in regards to Robin Hanson in particular with his treatment of status and signalling. On Overcoming Bias far more than here I get the impression that a lot of the essays develop out of posing a question and asking "is there a way I can use status and signalling to explain this?"