From Competition to Care. Rethinking Foundations.

Abstract

The dominant metaphor organizing modern evolutionary biology is competition. We assune the Darwinian struggle in which differential survival and reproduction drive the diversification of life. This essay argues that competition, while real, is derivative rather than foundational. Drawing on recent work in evolutionary transitions in individuality, embodied cognition, and the biology of multicellularity, I propose that caring (defined here as concerned movement for continuance) is the more fundamental ontological primitive from which cooperation, agency, and individuality emerge. In other words, care is constitutive. This reorientation does not displace natural selection but situates it within a deeper story about what living systems are and what they do. The body, on this view, is not a product of competitive selection among parts but is itself caring in tension and ambiguity, best modeled as organizations of concern at various scales.

I. The Problem Competition Cannot Solve

There is a moment in the history of life that the standard Darwinian account struggles to explain, and that struggle reveals something important about the account itself. When independent cells first became multicellular organisms — one of the major transitions in the history of evolution — the logic of natural selection faces a peculiar bootstrapping problem. You cannot explain the emergence of cooperative cellular organization from below, through the self-interest of individual cells, because genuinely selfish cells would defect from any cooperative arrangement that imposed costs on their own replication. And you cannot explain it from above, through selection on the organism as a whole, because there is not yet an organism-level individual on which selection can act. The thing to be explained — the organism — is what you need to already have in order to run the explanation. The best way to explain this is via multiplicities.

This is a structural problem that recurs across what biologists call evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs): the moments when previously independent replicators — genes into genomes, cells into organisms, organisms into colonies — became integrated wholes capable of reproduction and selection at a new level (Maynard Smith & Szathmáry, 1995; Michod, 1999). Each such transition involves entities that were formerly capable of independent replication becoming capable of replication only as parts of a larger whole. The transition itself, however, cannot be explained by the logic that governs what comes after it.

Recent theoretical work has proposed that the resolution lies in recognizing that agency — the capacity for information integration and collective action — is primary to living systems, and not itself a product of natural selection (Watson & Levin, 2023; Levin, 2019). On this view, the evolutionary unit is not the precondition for agency but its product. What comes first is not the organism as a competitive individual but the collective doing: information integration, coordinated response, shared action. The organism emerges from that doing, rather than the doing emerging from the organism.

This inversion is important. But it raises an immediate further question: what is agency, ontologically? The structural description — information integration plus collective action — is accurate as a functional characterization, but it does not tell us what kind of thing agency is, or why some physical systems have it and others do not. A hurricane integrates meteorological information and produces coordinated, large-scale behavior. We do not think hurricanes have agency. Something more needs to be said.

II. Care as Ontological Primitive

I want to propose that the missing concept is care — understood not in its sentimental, human-scaled register, but as a formal ontological primitive: concerned movement for continuance. This is the activity that distinguishes living systems from complex physical systems that merely process information or exhibit self-organization. A hurricane dissipates. It does not care about its continuance; it has no orientation toward its own persistence. A bacterium chemotaxes toward glucose. It does not merely respond to a gradient; all its movement is organized around the maintenance of its configuration, its ongoing being. This is caring in the minimal, non-anthropomorphic sense — concerned movement toward continuance.

The distinction matters because it explains why information integration in living systems is not merely information processing. Information integrates — becomes meaningful, becomes a basis for action — because it matters differentially to continuance. The glucose gradient matters to the bacterium in a way that the pressure gradient does not matter to the hurricane. The hurricane's response to pressure is causal; the bacterium's response to glucose is caring. Care, on this account, is what makes information integration genuine integration rather than mere physical correlation (Thompson, 2007; Jonas, 1966).

This is not a novel intuition. It has roots in phenomenological biology, particularly in the work of Hans Jonas, who argued that with the emergence of life a new ontological category entered the world: needful freedom. The living organism, Jonas wrote, is the first instance of nature that has a good, a stake in its own continuance, and therefore a perspective from which the world is organized into what matters and what does not (Jonas, 1966). What I am proposing is that this insight, which phenomenology developed at the organismal scale, can be extended across biological scales — from the autocatalytic chemistry of the earliest metabolisms to the complex social bonds of conscious animals — without losing its ontological bite.

The scale-invariance of care is crucial. At the molecular level, autocatalytic sets maintain their organization through something structurally analogous to caring — self-referential chemistry that stabilizes itself against dissipation (Kauffman, 1993). At the cellular level, homeostasis, membrane maintenance, and chemotaxis are all forms of concerned movement. At the organismal level, goal-directed behavior, immune response, and wound healing exhibit caring at a new scale of integration. At the social level — in the mutual concern that binds organisms into relationships, families, and communities — caring takes forms we recognize more readily as such. In each case, what we find is the same ontological primitive organized at a different scale and with a different degree of complexity.

III. The Body as Care Collective

If care is ontologically primary, then the question of what a body is can be reframed. The body is not a collection of parts that happen to cooperate because cooperation was selected for. It is a care collective: an organization of concern at a scale at which the continuance of the whole has become irreducible to the sum of the continuances of its parts. The emergence of the body is the emergence of a new scale of caring.

This formulation connects to, and I think clarifies, one of the central themes in embodied cognitive science. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's account of the body-subject emphasized what he called the fundamental ambiguity of embodiment: the body is simultaneously the one who perceives and the one who is perceived, the toucher and the touched, subject and object (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 1968). This ambiguity is not a philosophical puzzle to be dissolved but a structural feature of any entity that is both a unified perspective on the world and a material thing in the world. The body is, in Merleau-Ponty's phrase, "the flesh of the world" — not a substance enclosed within a boundary but a fold or knot in a fabric that is continuous with its environment.

The care-collective account of the body illuminates why this ambiguity is structural rather than incidental. A care collective is precisely the kind of thing that is both one and many: one in its organization of concern at the collective scale, many in the individual caring of its constituent parts. The cell membrane is a boundary not because it is a physical barrier but because caring is organized differently on either side of it — the metabolic cycles within care about maintaining this particular configuration; the environment without does not. The boundary emerges from the differential organization of caring, not the other way around.

This also resolves the scale problem that haunts discussions of agency and individuality. If agency is simply information integration plus collective action, it seems to apply at virtually every scale — to cells, organisms, ecosystems, and perhaps the biosphere itself — without any principled way to say where one individual ends and another begins (Godfrey-Smith, 2009). The care-collective account provides such a principle: an individual is defined by a scale at which caring reorganizes such that the whole's continuance is not decomposable into the sum of its parts' continuances. Different scales of caring can be real simultaneously — this is not a contradiction but a feature of nested care collectives — and the appropriate scale of analysis depends on which organization of concern one is investigating.

IV. Cooperation as Primary, Competition as Derived

The most significant implication of the care-collective account concerns the relationship between cooperation and competition in evolutionary theory. The standard picture treats competition as the engine of evolution and cooperation as a phenomenon that requires special explanation — kin selection, reciprocal altruism, group selection, or some other mechanism that makes cooperation instrumentally rational for competing individuals (Hamilton, 1964; Trivers, 1971; Wilson & Sober, 1994). On this picture, cooperation is derivative; competition is the ground.

The care-collective account inverts this priority. Cooperation — or more precisely, mutual concern, the expansion of caring to include the continuance of another — is ontologically primary. It is what living systems do before they are evolutionary units, before there is competition at their scale. The cells that became the first multicellular organisms were not competing individuals who discovered a cooperative equilibrium. They were already in relationship, already affecting each other's conditions for continuance, already organized into care collectives that integrated information and acted collectively. The organism emerged when that mutual concern deepened — when the caring reorganized at a new scale that included the collective's continuance as primary. Competition at the organismal scale came after, not before.

This is not to deny that competition exists or that it plays a powerful role in shaping the diversity and adaptation of life. Natural selection, operating on heritable variation in reproductive success, is a real and potent process. But it operates on individuals — evolutionary units — that are themselves products of care collectives. Competition presupposes individuals; individuals presuppose care. The competitive logic of natural selection therefore sits within a larger story whose deepest structure is cooperative, or more precisely, caring.

There is empirical support for this reorientation from multiple directions. The extensive work on symbiogenesis — the role of symbiosis and merger, rather than competition, in major evolutionary transitions — suggests that cooperation has been central to the generation of biological novelty (Margulis, 1998; Sagan, 1967). Studies of the microbiome reveal that what we have long treated as the individual organism is itself an ecological community, a care collective of organisms in mutual metabolic dependence (Gilbert, Sapp & Tauber, 2012). Research on niche construction demonstrates that organisms routinely alter the selective environments in which they and their descendants evolve, making evolutionary change partly a function of collective world-building rather than passive response to external selection pressures (Odling-Smee, Laland & Feldman, 2003). None of these findings fits easily within a framework that treats competition as the ground and cooperation as the exception.

V. Knowing as Caring: The Epistemic Dimension

The care-collective account has implications not only for evolutionary biology but for how we understand cognition and its relationship to living systems. The enactive and embodied traditions in cognitive science have argued that cognition is not the manipulation of internal representations by a brain enclosed within a skull, but the ongoing activity of a living organism engaged with an environment that matters to it (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991; Thompson, 2007). On this view, cognition is continuous with life: both are forms of concerned engagement with a world that matters differentially to continuance.

What the care-collective account adds is a clearer account of the ontological basis of this continuity. Cognition is caring at the scale of organisms capable of modeling their environment and acting on those models. The information a cognitive system integrates is not merely processed but mattering — differentially significant to the organism's continuance. To know something, on this account, is not to acquire a representation of it while remaining unchanged. It is to be transformed by encounter with it, to become a system in which the other's properties matter in a new way.

This has an interesting consequence for the understanding of social cognition and the emergence of care collectives at the human scale. When two organisms come to know each other — genuinely know each other, in a way that involves real transformation rather than the mere accumulation of information — they become mutual models. Each becomes a system in which the other's concerns are represented and, crucially, taken up. The concerns of the other become concerns of the self. The scope of caring expands. A new care collective emerges — not by dissolving the prior individuals, but by organizing a new scale at which their shared concern becomes primary.

This is, I would argue, what love is in its deepest functional sense: not a sentiment overlaid on biological competition, but care at the scale of conscious, vulnerable, mutual relationship. And if care is the ontological primitive of life, then love is not biology's sentimental excess. It is biology's most fully realized expression.

VI. Toward a Biology of Care

What would it mean to practice a biology of care? It would not mean abandoning the tools and findings of evolutionary theory, molecular biology, or genetics. It would mean situating those tools and findings within a broader explanatory framework organized around a different foundational question. Instead of asking first how competition among replicators produces the diversity and complexity of life, we would ask first: what are living systems doing, and what kind of thing do you have to be to do it?

The answer, on the account developed here, is that living systems are care collectives — systems engaged in concerned movement for continuance — organized at multiple nested scales. Natural selection operates on care collectives that have achieved sufficient integration and heritability to be evolutionary units. But care collectives precede evolutionary units, and the emergence of evolutionary units is itself a product of care reorganizing at new scales. Competition is real. But it is downstream of care, not upstream.

This reorientation has practical implications. Research programs focused on understanding how care collectives form and stabilize — how concern expands, how new scales of caring emerge — may illuminate aspects of biological organization that competition-centered frameworks systematically obscure. The study of symbiosis, metabolic interdependence, developmental plasticity, and niche construction all become central rather than peripheral when care is recognized as primary. So does the study of breakdown: disease, ecological collapse, and social fragmentation can be understood as failures of care collectives — the disintegration of mutual concern — rather than simply as failures of competitive fitness.

There is also something important here for the relationship between scientific and humanistic modes of understanding life. The assumption that scientific explanation must be free of the concepts that organize personal and social experience — that care, concern, and love are inappropriate in the laboratory — has costs. It places an artificial barrier between the explanation of life and the lived experience of living, and it forecloses exactly the kinds of inquiry most likely to illuminate the deepest structures of biological organization. If care is ontologically basic to life, then the scientist who excludes care from the explanatory vocabulary is not achieving objectivity. She is simply failing to notice what is most fundamental about her subject matter.

The history of science has repeatedly required the expansion of its conceptual vocabulary to accommodate phenomena that prior frameworks could not capture. The shift from Newtonian mechanics to thermodynamics, from classical to quantum mechanics, from the genetics of individuals to the ecology of populations — each required not just new data but new concepts. I am suggesting that the shift from a competition-centered to a care-centered biology is a conceptual expansion of this kind. It does not invalidate what came before. It places it within a larger and more adequate account of what life is and what living systems do.

Conclusion

The body is not a truce among competing parts. It is a care collective: a reorganization of concern at a scale at which the whole's continuance is no longer decomposable into the continuances of its components. This is a different picture of life than the one organized around competition, selection, and the survival of the fittest — not because competition and selection are false, but because they are not the whole story, and not the deepest part of it.

Care is the ontological primitive of life. It is what makes information integration genuine rather than merely causal. It is what drives the formation of care collectives across scales — from autocatalytic chemistry to multicellular organisms to conscious social animals. It is the activity from which cooperation, individuality, and cognition emerge. Natural selection acts on its products; it does not explain its origins.

To recognize care as primary is not to sentimentalize biology. It is to take seriously what living systems are actually doing — and to follow that recognition wherever it leads.

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