Does Earth’s habitability for life exist due to or in spite of Darwinian evolution by natural selection?

A good case can be made that life is an inherently planetary phenomenon. If correct, this proposition implies that any extraterrestrial life will necessarily co-occur with planetary scale chemical/climatic disequilibrium. But life's fundamental sense-making principle, Darwinian evolution by natural selection, operates far below the planetary scale, within populations of organisms (or genes, groups, etc.). This spatio-temporal disconnect means that the question of whether Darwinian evolution tends to stabilize or destabilize Earth's climatic habitability, is one that remains almost completely unanswered. 

This question is intertwined with the long history of debate within Darwinism pertaining to long-term trends in biological complexity and diversity, and the relative importance of permissive environments versus within-biosphere innovation in driving macro-evolutionary trends. Recent attempts to bridge this gap and potentially "Darwinize Gaia" (or at least fully explore the implications of heterodox forms of selection at an Earth system scale) invoke persistence-based selection at the level of biogeochemical cycle-variants. 

But a sticking point has been the derivation of a non-arbitrary characterization of the differentially persisting entities that this process involves. We hope to derive such an account through a combination of theoretical biological modelling, philosophy of biology, and Earth system modelling, thereby assessing the plausibility of the notion of a "Darwinized" Gaia.