Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~110,000 words · 546 passages
Cite this work
- APAPeter Kropotkin. (n.d.). Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/peter-kropotkin/mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution
- MLAPeter Kropotkin. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/peter-kropotkin/mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution.
- ChicagoPeter Kropotkin. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/peter-kropotkin/mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
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.
Struggle for existence. Mutual Aid a law of Nature and chief factor of progressive evolution. Invertebrates. Ants and Bees. Birds, hunting and fishing associations. Sociability. Mutual protection among small birds. Cranes, parrots. The conception of struggle for existence as a factor of evolution, introduced into science by Darwin and Wallace, has permitted us to embrace an immensely wide range of phenomena in one single generalization, which soon became the very basis of our philosophical, biological, and sociological speculations. An immense variety of facts:--adaptations of function and structure of organic beings to their surroundings; physiological and anatomical evolution; intellectual progress, and moral development itself, which we formerly used to explain by so many different causes, were embodied by Darwin in one general conception. We understood them as continued endeavours--as a struggle against adverse circumstances--for such a development of individuals, races, species and societies, as would result in the greatest possible fulness, variety, and intensity of life. It may be that at the outset Darwin himself was not fully aware of the generality of the factor which he first invoked for explaining one series only of facts relative to the accumulation of individual variations in incipient species. But he foresaw that the term which he was introducing into science would lose its philosophical and its only true meaning if it were to be used in its narrow sense only--that of a struggle between separate individuals for the sheer means of existence. And at the very beginning of his memorable work he insisted upon the term being taken in