Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~110,000 words · 546 passages
Cite this work
- APAPeter Kropotkin. (n.d.). Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/peter-kropotkin/mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution
- MLAPeter Kropotkin. "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/peter-kropotkin/mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution.
- ChicagoPeter Kropotkin. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/peter-kropotkin/mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution.
What it is about
Kropotkin's answer, of 1902, to those who said Darwin had shown life to be a struggle of all against all: cooperation, he argues, is also a factor of evolution, and a commoner one.
Context and history
Kropotkin was a geographer and had spent five years in Siberia looking for the pitiless competition he expected to find there; what he saw was animals helping one another survive a climate that was killing them. The book runs through ants, birds, mammals, tribes, medieval towns with their guilds and commons, and the trade unions and friendly societies of his own day. His thesis is not that competition does not exist, but that Huxley's 'social Darwinism' had taken half a theory and made an ideology of it. Kropotkin was an anarchist and a prince by birth, and the book serves as biological ground for his politics; it should be read knowing that, and knowing too that later biology has borne him out more than it once seemed.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys which I made in my youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria. One of them was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural agencies; and the consequent paucity of life over the vast territory which fell under my observation. And the other was, that even in those few spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to find--although I was eagerly looking for it--that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution. The terrible snow-storms which sweep over the northern portion of Eurasia in the later part of the winter, and the glazed frost that often follows them; the frosts and the snow-storms which return every year in the second half of May, when the trees are already in full blossom and insect life swarms everywhere; the early frosts and, occasionally, the heavy snowfalls in July and August, which suddenly destroy myriads of insects, as well as the second broods of the birds in the prairies; the torrential rains, due to the monsoons, which fall in more temperate regions in August and September--resulting in inundations on a scale which is only known in America and in Eastern Asia, and swamping, on the plateaus, areas as wide as European States; and finally, the heavy snowfalls, early in October, which eventually render a territory as large as France and Germany, absolutely impracticable for ruminants, and destroy them by the thousand--these were the conditions under which I saw animal life struggling in Northern Asia. They made me realize at an early date the ove