Mutual Aid: A Factor of EvolutionKropotkin, Petr Alekseevich, kniaz
Science
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich, kniaz
Cooperation; Social groups; Social institutions
That life in societies is the most powerful weapon in the struggle for
life, taken in its widest sense, has been illustrated by several
examples on the foregoing pages, and could be illustrated by any amount
of evidence, if further evidence were required. Life in societies
enables the feeblest insects, the feeblest birds, and the feeblest
mammals to resist, or to protect themselves from, the most terrible
birds and beasts of prey; it permits longevity; it enables the species
to rear its progeny with the least waste of energy and to maintain its
numbers albeit a very slow birth-rate; it enables the gregarious animals
to migrate in search of new abodes. Therefore, while fully admitting
that force, swiftness, protective colours, cunningness, and endurance to
hunger and cold, which are mentioned by Darwin and Wallace, are so many
qualities making the individual, or the species, the fittest under
certain circumstances, we maintain that under any circumstances
sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life. Those
species which willingly or unwillingly abandon it are doomed to decay;
while those animals which know best how to combine, have the greatest
chances of survival and of further evolution, although they may be
inferior to others in each of the faculties enumerated by Darwin and
Wallace, save the intellectual faculty. The highest vertebrates, and
especially mankind, are the best proof of this assertion. As to the
intellectual faculty, while every Darwinist will agree with Darwin that
it is the most powerful arm in the struggle for life, and the most
powerful factor of further evolution, he also will admit that
intelligence is an eminently social faculty. Language, imitation, and
accumulated experience are so many elements of growing intelligence of
which the unsociable animal is deprived. Therefore we find, at the top
of each class of animals, the ants, the parrots, and the monkeys, all
combining the greatest sociability with the highest development of
intelligence. The fittest are thus the most sociable animals, and
sociability appears as the chief factor of evolution, both directly, by
securing the well-being of the species while diminishing the waste of
energy, and indirectly, by favouring the growth of intelligence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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