And in what way would it be consistently advantageous over "Get laid. Do not get killed"?

Do you feel attracted to all people of your preferred gender by the same amount?

How the frack would brainware favoring something as ephemeral as "status" have evolved?

If we didn't have brainware for favoring status, people wouldn't have a preference for attaining it, or the ability to recognize it, at all. I suspect anyone who's been through an ordinary public school will be able to attest that humans, from an early age, tend to have some degree of motivation to have standing among their peers, and are able to follow cues to determine who has such standing and who does not. If we've established that such apparatus exists at all, it's not a big jump to implementing it in mate selection.

And in what way would it be consistently advantageous over "Get laid. Do not get killed"?

I'm going to disagree with Kindly and say that there is a readily apparent advantage here. For most of our evolutionary history, high status would be associated with ability to provide for offspring. A leader who has many underlings paying tribute can much more easily support raising children in safety and abundance than one of the underlings whose resources are being taken in tribute. If we're looking at a culture with really large status differentials, say, Ancient Egypt, a Pharaoh who's already had two hundred kids by various women is still more able to support the raising of a few more than a peasant laborer who hasn't had any children at all yet.

We can confirm via genetics that humans alive today have considerably fewer male ancestors than female, because it was rarer for women to go without having any children than men, but men were more likely to have many children by different partners. Reports of sexual activity among men and women support the same pattern today.

If both men and women had drives that amounted only to "get laid, don't get killed," we would be unlikely to observe such a pattern. Among animals, organisms with more than a very small amount of processing power tend to implement more complex selection strategies than this. Take, for example, all the herbivores where the males have horns they use to compete with other males over females.

Keep in mind that beyond attempting to survive and have offspring, there's a genetic advantage in displacing competitors. Every specimen benefits from getting their genes as large a share of the next generation as possible. This will tend to complicate reproductive strategies well beyond the level of "survive and have kids."

If status was really what women wanted, the vast majority of men would go to their graves without ever getting laid.

I seem to recall someone mentioning a study concluding that probably only about 40% of men who ever lived had children, compared to about 80% of women.

Uh, the same way anything like pairbonding evolved? What about maternal feelings towards children? What about paternal feelings toward children? What about complicated behaviors like nesting, animal mating rituals, and dominance fights among (to pick the first of dozens of examples that sprang to my mind) elk? Status games ABOUND in nature, and mating that isn't just "getting laid" takes place among tons of species, and humans especially. Having a high status man sleep with you isn't anywhere near enough to safely and happily raise children, even assuming you get pregnant.

If we ignore your weird ignorance of nature: Social skills do not equal high status. they correlate with high status, but they're not the same thing. Not understanding what is appropriate to say to someone you're trying to get into bed is a sign of foolishness and lack of care far more than it's a sign of low status.

his is bad reasoning. If status was really what women wanted, the vast majority of men would go to their graves without ever getting laid.

Well, I said they're after social skills, not status. And there are others factor involved, for example availability.

In what way would it be consistently advantageous over "Get laid. Do not get killed"?

It wouldn't, but "Get laid. Do not get killed" is a low bar to clear. Once you can do that, your goals may change to finding the best possible partner to get laid with/by (what is the correct preposition here?) and this is where status comes in.

As to your other objection:

If status was really what women wanted, the vast majority of men would go to their graves without ever getting laid.

Women also have status. High-status women sleep with high-status men and low-status women sleep with low-status men. (Also high-status men sometimes sleep with other high-status men and so on.)

I don't see a need to separate social skills with pleasure seeking/danger avoidance. Generally, someone with a lot of social skill isn't a rapist, and someone with a lot of social skill would probably have a lot of experience giving pleasure as well.

In my experience, women have been more open to me once they've seen that I'm popular with other women. If I were in academia, I would test this by designing a variation of that classic approach-random-women-and-ask-for-sex experiment with one group of males being seen in the company of a lot of women and another group of males approaching alone.