Gould on Kropotkin & evolution

[Alex Trotter <uburoi@xxxxxxxxx>]

In his book *Bully for Brontosaurus* S.J. Gould has an essay called
"Kropotkin Was no Crackpot" concerning the critique of Darwinism by the
Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin, who was himself a scientist. Kropotkin
argued in his book *Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution* that although
there was indeed struggle in nature, it tended to take the form more of
organisms with their environment (leading to cooperation between
organisms) than of organisms against each other (leading to the
pitiless "nature red in tooth and claw") which, when applied to human
society, lent support to capitalism's Hobbesian war of all against all.
Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog") had accepted the notion of combat as
principal criterion of evolutionary success, reasoning that nature could
therefore not serve as a model for a moral order in human society.
Kropotkin, on the other hand, because he saw mutual aid as the prime
criterion for evolutionary success, believed that human society could in
fact build upon its natural tendencies rather than reversing or
suppressing them. Gould is quite sympathetic to Kropotkin's view in this
essay, although he points out that K. made a common error in seeing
natural selection as a process favoring whole populations rather than (as
Gould argues) individual organisms--and this regardless of whether the
struggle for existence is about cooperation or competition.


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