There is an egocentric component to Darwinian survival that in the context of a circumstance such as Earth, one full of life, that the individual or an individuals species is the measure of survival, where the reality is given the plethora of opportunities for molecules to persist, the individual is a notion of and by us.
This is a massive projection of our self-image onto the physical world, the chemical world.
Genetically, in the great pool of alleles, notions that there is a point where I end and another begins is entirely arbitrary.
We find bones and assert the Neanderthal is extinct, and for the sake of argument lets go with the notion that we and Neanderthal never interbred. The fact is, extinct or not, we are some 99% genetically identical. The self replicating molecules are doing just fine.
That you or I respect the boundaries that we feel describes our identities is fine, but chemically, what one has is self-replicating molecules, although that self-replication is highly dependent on other molecules. That the information for such a molecule happens to reside in my genome, or any collection of genomes is importance only I am providing.
Communities of these molecules do at times have shared fates, but considering that they have placed their bets on so many genomes and so many species, that one stops and another starts is more an Ansel Adams thing and less a chemical truth.
I assume folks are familiar with Dawkins and the Selfish Gene and that marmot stuff and so on, but if one simply completely divorces themselves from the sense of individuals, species and so on, and simply seeks to identify successful molecules, then at the top of the list are things like DNA and RNA polymerase, the tRNAs and so on, they are completely ubiquitous. We can march down the chain of successful molecules and observe that certain collections provide for individuals, that when measured at an individual level, provide comparative success ... but it is only because we assign individualism, not because it somehow is.
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