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The problem of the meaning of life is herewith contemplated from a Darwinian perspective. It is argued how factors such as existential depression, the concern about the meaning of "meaning," the problem of evil, death as the end of our personal identity, happiness as an unachievable goal, etc. may well have an adaptive dimension "controlled" neither by ourselves nor obscure third parties (conspiracy theories) but "simply" by our genes (replicators in general) so that little if anything is to be done to find a radical remedy for the human condition.

The Red Queen hypothesis, or the ability organisms have to control and regulate the available trophic energy, is a recently proposed parameter for measuring fitness. Firstly, this hypothesis is analysed in terms of its heuristic power. Secondly, the claimed causal dependence between this parameter and a, still controversial, law of constant extinction is judged to be unjustified, however reasonable such a claim appears to be. Finally, the ubiquity of competition in nature which is seemingly required by the Red Queen and supposedly realized at the expense of a mutualistic alternative, is deemed to be a questionable assumption.