Darwinism does not support capitalism

Darwin described the webs of connectedness that support all life, and economists need to understand that their discipline grows out of ecology

This week’s guest post is from Rowan Hooper, an evolutionary biologist, host of New Scientist’s podcast The World, the Universe and Us, and the author of Togetherness: Symbiosis and the Hidden Story of Life’s Greatest Collaborations.

When Karl Marx wrote that nature is seen by capitalism as a “free gift” that can be used at will, he didn’t mean it in a positive way. He meant that capitalism was in danger of over-exploiting natural resources because of the way we view the world.

It hardly seems a radical observation, yet it is one that many economists still ignore. As the economist Partha Dasgupta says in his 2025 book On Natural Capital, official thinking regards nature as infinite in wealth and capacity. “If biodiversity is absent from official economic reckoning today,” he says, “it is because Nature has been absent from economics all along.”

Why has nature been absent? The main reason, as Marx put it, is that nature has been seen as a source of free wealth. The economic theorist Friedrich Hayek made this explicit in 1960, writing that “to use up a free gift of nature once and for all is in such instances no more wasteful or reprehensible than a similar exploitation of a stock resource.”

Rampant exploitation, however, has left us in the midst of an extinction crisis to rival the one that wiped out the dinosaurs – a crisis that has pushed many ecosystems to the brink of collapse. The disasters we are facing, driven by Hayekian exploitation in the pursuit of profit, can be traced back to the assumption that competition is natural and the optimal basis for a society – an assumption often attributed to Charles Darwin. That assumption is false.

Darwin, it is true, presented life as a competitive struggle – but he did so in order to get his message across, and give people a story they wanted to hear. He was writing at the time of empire and the industrial revolution, when society was gripped by the ideas of Thomas Malthus and Thomas Hobbes; a time when people were thought to be innately competitive and ruthless creatures.

Marx, who admired Darwin and sent him a copy of Capital, recognised that Darwin’s theory of evolution reflected the society in which he operated. In 1862, just three years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, Marx wrote to Friedrich Engels: “It is remarkable how among beasts and plants Darwin recognises his English society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’. It is Hobbes’ war of every man against every man.”

I understand why he did it, but Darwin went too far. Darwinism was seized on as scientific justification for capitalism. Yet in my book Togetherness, I show that Darwin thought in ecological terms, even before the word “ecology” was coined.

The book reveals the unappreciated commonalities between the disciplines of ecology and economics – commonalities that go beyond their shared etymology. (“Eco” derives from the Greek oikos, meaning “home”.) These commonalities are rooted in the idea of ‘symbiosis’. In biology, symbiosis simply means the situation when two different species live together. But it is the basis of many interactions and processes in life, and it underpins the functioning of our ecosystems.

In about 80 per cent of all plants, including the crop plants that provide our food, there is an intimate and essential symbiosis operating underground. There is a partnership between fungi in the soil and the roots of plants, whereby plants provide fungi with sugars made by photosynthesis, and the fungi provide the plants with nutrients scavenged from the soil. In all legumes (beans, lentils, other pulses) there is an additional trade deal, this time between the plant and specialised bacteria in the root that make fertiliser for the plant. There are symbiotic trade deals between algae and animal cells in coral, and between fungi and algae in lichens.

Economics grows out of ecology. It’s no wonder that if you force unsustainable processes on either system – say over-leveraged debt, or a monoculture of some over-fertilised crop – you run the danger of the system collapsing.

“If ours were a rational society,” Vaclav Smil wrote in his 2003 book Energy at the Crossroads, “we would be paying much more anxious attention to nature’s services than to Dow Jones and NASDAQ indices.”

There is no scientific or Darwinian justification for capitalism. It has never been more urgent that we understand how nature works, and that economists correct their ignorance of ecology.

Rowan Hooper is the author of Togetherness: Symbiosis and the Hidden Story of Life’s Greatest Collaborations.