Capitalism’s extractive logic distorts evolutionary theory, obscuring life’s interdependence and communal origins
Original framing: “Capitalism has warped our understanding of ecology and life’s origins” — New Scientist
Indigenous epistemologies universally frame life as relational, cyclical, and interdependent, rejecting the capitalist extraction of Darwinism’s ‘survival of the fittest.’ The Māori concept of *kaitiakitanga* (guardianship) and the Lakota *Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ* (‘all my relations’) exemplify how life’s origins are understood as communal, not competitive. These perspectives are systematically erased by Western science’s reductionist lens, which prioritises individualism and hierarchy. Capitalism’s co-optation of evolutionary theory mirrors its broader erasure of Indigenous knowledge systems to justify land theft and resource extraction.
The capitalist co-optation of Darwinism exemplifies how economic ideologies reshape scientific narratives to justify exploitation, erasing the communal and relational origins of life.
Indigenous cosmologies, from *Ubuntu* to *Pachamama*, and pre-capitalist societies like the European commons or Māori *kaitiakitanga*, offer living alternatives to the ‘survival of the fittest’ trope, revealing life as a web of reciprocity. This erasure is not accidental but structural, embedded in colonial science’s suppression of non-Western knowledge and the neoliberal framing of biology as a competitive arena. Future models must centre relational ontologies, as seen in regenerative economics and Indigenous stewardship, while trickster figures like Anansi or Hermes expose the absurdity of naturalising competition. The path forward requires decolonising science, funding marginalised voices, and reimagining economics as a force for ecological and communal flourishing, not extraction.