I think that darwinism is a concept that applies in many aspects of science. For instance, If chemical reactions avoid equillibrium, then they will undergo some sort of darwinism c, and the long term result will be the prevailance and selection of the most sustainable systems of reactions. But as i previously said, what is life other than a sum of self-sustainable chemical systems?
However, as you pointed out, things are not that easy, because this means that in the above scenario, a chemical chaos will be created instead, and if we assign an entropy on life as a whole system, this will increase over time. In this sense, chemistry is indeed the same thing as biology, only more complex.
However, i think that this actually might be the case after all, and i will explain..
We think of life as miracle and order, because for instance, some might say that a cell is much more ordered than its components, which means that a cell is an ordered and not a chaotic system.
But:
A cell is much more ordered than its components, but what we forget is that a cell never exists in isolation. Imagine you have a flask with water that is heated with fire. The molecules of water will start speeding randomly toward various directions. Virtually, what you are doing here with the cell argument is ignoring the fire and the majority of other water molecules and focusing only on subset of 1 or 2 specific molecules. These molecules will be perceived as gaining speed without an obvious reason,..
Lesson: Never forget the rest of the picture..
For this reason, i believe that we should re-evaluate everything from the beginning and accept nothing as an a-priori knowledge. In other words, we should test experimentally, those entropic changes over time in living systems as directly as possible..
If there are increases, i don't see why chemistry is any different from biology....
