Paradigms exist at different levels. I'm not sure what you are getting at, but cosmology in the literal sense is at the wrong scale to affect the observable processes of variation and selection. It may come in handy if science develops fruitful hypotheses concerning abiogenesis.
The reason science is not spending much time on things like group consciousness is that there is no known mechanism to support such a phenomenon, no data that require such an interpretation, and thousands of years of superstition, fraud and quackery in this arena.
It seems obvious to me that a field is involved -- EM or other. Fields are universal in extention, but are susceptible to local organization and use by living organisms. That would be your mechanism. With respect to the social animals (bees, ants, etc.), it is apparent that the "real" organism or animal is the entire hive; the seemingly discrete, individual bee is analogous to a cell in the body of, say, the human organism. All the "cells" are coordinated, integrated, and organized into the forms and behaviors that advance the life prospects of the total animal, by means of "successful communication" with a source of relevant biological information that is mediated by a field.
We are all of us up to our eyeballs in fields of various kinds (e.g., quantum, EM, gravitational). But we do not notice this, of course.
Anyhoot, the above is an interesting conjecture that is receiving serious scientific attention. Believe it or not. I suppose you would be inclined to simply dismiss the entire affair as just another fraud or quackery in the making.... Me, I'll just wait on forthcoming developments before I make up my mind.