Happy birthday, Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (Russian: Пётр Алексе́евич Кропо́ткин; 9 December 1842 – 8 February 1921) zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geographer, writer, and one of the worlds foremost anarcho-communists. Kropotkin advocated a communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations between workers. He wrote many books, pamphlets and articles, the most prominent being The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, and also contributed the article on anarchism to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition. His principal scientific offering, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution was published in 1902, partly in response to social Darwinism and in particular to Thomas H. Huxleys Nineteenth Century essay, The Struggle for Existence. Kropotkins book drew on his experiences in scientific expeditions in Siberia to illustrate the phenomenon of cooperation. After examining the evidence of cooperation in nonhuman animals, in pre-feudal societies and medieval cities, and in modern times, he concluded that cooperation and mutual aid are the most important factors in the evolution of species and the ability to survive. Russian science was more oriented towards the German model of dialectical materialism, and the observation of nature. Whereas Darwin projected the mechanism that makes artificial selection work in animal husbandry, and picked supporting evidence from nature to show selection occurred naturally, Kropotkin’s work cannot be dismissed as the idiosyncratic product of an anarchist dabbling in biology and that his views were but one expression of a broad current in Russian evolutionary thought that pre-dated, indeed encouraged, his work on the subject and was by no means confined to leftist thinkers. Kropotkin, observing nature is the harsher conditions of Siberia, pointed out the distinction between the direct struggle among individuals for limited resources (generally called competition) and the more metaphorical struggle between organisms and the environment (tending to be cooperative). He therefore did not deny the competitive form of struggle, but argued that the cooperative counterpart has been underemphasized: To me, it seems that Kropotkin looked at a world in which the unit of selection was not the individual, but the species. There is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species; there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defense...Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Kropotkins insights helped to formulate the theory of reciprocal altruism and the concept of an ecology composed of species that collectively produce a working system. https://youtube/watch?v=etYwhjOPQLA
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 09:27:05 +0000
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