Capitalism has warped our understanding of ecology and life’s origins

The phrase “survival of the fittest” is so closely associated with Darwinism that many people assume Charles Darwin himself wrote it. He didn’t – it was foisted on him by a contemporary, Herbert Spencer. It is true, however, that in On the Origin of Species, Darwin emphasised competition as the dominant process behind life – but, like all of us, he was shaped by his environment.

Darwin presented an account of nature as a competitive struggle not so much because that is how he saw it, but because he sought to deliver in his book what he thought people wanted to hear. This was a time of empire, and also of the industrial revolution, when society was gripped by the ideas of Thomas Malthus and Thomas Hobbes; people were thought to be innately competitive and ruthless creatures. And he was right about the appeal: ever since, Darwinism has been invoked as scientific justification for the worst sins of humanity.

But other lenses are worth exploring. Darwin also thought in ecological terms, even before the word “ecology” was coined. Here, a communal view comes to the fore. As we explore, this way of thinking could, perhaps surprisingly, shed light on one of the greatest mysteries of science: the origin of life.

One of the most promising avenues towards explaining how life arose from non-life takes ideas from the microbiologist Carl Woese, who imagined that life evolved in a communal broth, a loosely knit, sharing conglomeration of molecules.

What modern research is showing, remarkably, is that many key components and processes of life – including metabolism and even genetic coding for functional proteins – can arise spontaneously, merely through chemistry. Rather than seeing life as one lucky winner emerging victorious from “some warm little pond” – that turn of phrase really was Darwin’s coinage, for the record – instead it seems that perhaps a propensity for togetherness runs throughout life, right from the start.