Darwinism and its later developments together constitute a well-established paradigm. Nevertheless, some aspects of the paradigm continue to be the subject of animated debate. We show here how field theory, of the kind habitually used in physics, may offer a fresh complementary interpretation. We posit the existence of a classical scalar field, the vital field, whose intensity is sensitive to the inverse of specific entropy, such that its distribution tends to very high values in the interior of living beings. The field equations give rise to the existence of vital field waves, with their corresponding corpuscles, which we call vitons. To test this model, we have applied it to two specific problems: a) the intriguing existence of such progressively complex and improbable living beings, and b) the rapid difusion of the mutation of an individual to become a collective mutation of the entire species. This model is neither teleological nor based on the anthropic principle.