In terms of a sports analogy, what do I have to do to score a goal? Is Chinese culture like tennis, a solitary sport, only you score points by having more wealth or power than other people? Is Christianity more like baseball, a team sport, where you have sacrifice flies? Or American football, where maintaining solidarity in the defensive line is more important than clear thinking?

Your final paragraph is fizzing with germinal research programs.

The part where the strict cladistic analogy starts to fit less well is when we take into account that when biological speciation occurs, there can be no crossbreeding. Man can’t reproduce with a sheep, try as some might.

With human cultures, languages, and ways of thought, that’s not necessarily the case–certain concepts and ideas may become adopted by foreign hosts due to cultural diffusion, imposition, etc. It’s hard to discretely distinguish between similarities arising due to common descent and convergence due to contact. Do the languages of, say, the Altaic sprachbund possess similar features due to common descent or due to areal interaction? Possibly both? It’s not entirely clear when the possibility of horizontal transmission is present.

Another note is that biological species and/or human lineages may be qualitatively similar but not close in terms of common descent. This raises the question of the neoreaction’s relationships to Puritanism and libertarianism, as well as with Carlylean thought and throne ‘n’ altar conservatism. Are these similarities polyphyletic but distinct in lineage, or can we say that they arose due to cross-breeding between the two lineages?