Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

Against those who read Darwin's theory as a story of endless 'struggle for existence', in which only the most ruthless survive, the Russian naturalist Peter Kropotkin argues that cooperation is just as important a factor in evolution. Drawing on his own observations in Siberia, he describes mutual aid among ants, birds and mammals, and then traces it through human history: in tribes, village communities, medieval guilds and free cities, and in the unions and friendly societies of his own day.

Kropotkin (1842–1921), a prince who became an anarchist and spent years in prison and exile, published the essays as a book in 1902, in reply to an article by Thomas Huxley. Biologists studying cooperation have given his ideas new attention. Worth reading alongside it: his The Conquest of Bread, and compare Darwin's On the Origin of Species.