Darwin was much influenced first by the gloomy T R Malthus and then championed by the pugnacious T H Huxley. Colin Tudge suggests that if only Darwin had known the Russian naturalist and activist Peter Kropotkin the world might now be a very different place
Two of the most influential books published in the 19th century were An Essay on the Principle of Population by the economist and cleric Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834); and The Origin of Species by the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1881). Those two – together with Karl Marx’s Das Kapital – have significantly shaped the course of modern history.
Malthus preferred to be called Robert and was known to his friends as “Bob” and to his students as “Pop” – not in fact an affectionate variant of “Dad” but short for “population”. But although this sounds all very cosy the various editions of his Essay, published between 1798 and 1826, suggest he was a gloomy soul. For he argued among much else that all creatures have the potential to out-breed their resources, and in practice tend to do so. Then the population either crashes, like lemmings, or lives on in a precarious and embattled state, always hard up against the limits of their own environment. All produce as many offspring as their environment will support — which means that all are obliged to compete from conception to the grave for what there is. He wasn’t himself a naturalist, a close observer of nature, but his logic seems inexorable.
Darwin’s Origin of Species was first published in 1859 with five more editions to follow (the 2nd is generally considered to be the best). He proposed, first and foremost, that all creatures that ever trod the Earth evolved from more primitive ancestors – they were not simply created in their present forms as described in Genesis. That in itself is a huge idea with endless ramifications, and like all the biggest ideas of humankind it has proved to be extremely divisive, often with most unpleasant consequences (but don’t blame Darwin).
Secondly, in Origin of Species, Darwin proposed that a principal mechanism of evolution – though not the only mechanism — is natural selection; and natural selection, as he described it in Origin, was and is driven by competition. Thus — citing Malthus — he argued that because all creatures tend to outbreed their resources all are engaged willy-nilly in a “struggle for life” or a “struggle for existence”. He perceived that the struggle is both between members of the same species, and indeed between members of the same population or the same family; and between creatures of different species – antelopes vs lions, for instance. He also observed that in creatures that reproduce by sex, no two individuals are exactly the same — so some inevitably will be better adapted to the conditions than others and fight their corner more convincingly; and they would be the most likely to survive and to produce offspring. Nature itself, then, selects the survivors and so shapes the lineage, just as farmers select the meatiest or the milkiest cattle to breed from (or the ones with the biggest horns or the nicest colour, because farmers are also driven by aesthetics and indeed by whim). Hence “natural selection”. Again, the logic behind it was inexorable.
Darwin wasn’t of course the first to conceive of evolution – there are intimations of the idea in many cultures, dating back many centuries – and neither was he the first to conceive of natural selection. In particular, several early 19th century thinkers came up at least with the bones of the idea, and Darwin’s younger contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) grasped the whole thing, and provided valuable insights of his own. (Darwin and Wallace remained on very good terms. Darwin never seemed to see those with similar ideas as rivals, or critics as enemies. He always took serious thinkers seriously.) But Origin was a tour de force, describing the mechanism of natural selection from all angles and in fine detail. It demands to be taken seriously, both by those who accept his arguments and those who don’t.
Enter Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895). He was a great friend of the Darwins, known to Darwin’s many children as “Uncle Henry”. Like Malthus, he preferred to be known by his middle name. Huxley was an excellent biologist in his own right and he wasn’t just a friend. He was more abrasive than Darwin and was commonly known as “Darwin’s bulldog”. As befits a bulldog, he seized upon the Malthusian notion that life is inescapably competitive, one long punch-up from conception to the grave – and saw too that human beings, like all creatures, are caught up in it. In an essay entitled Struggle for Existence and its Bearing upon Man – his “manifesto for survival” — Huxley wrote that among “primitive men”, as among all animals,
“ … the weakest and stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their circumstances, but not the best in another waysurvived. Life was a continuous free fight, and beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence”
But competition, a relentless “struggle for existence” – is by no means the only driver of evolution by means of natural selection. Enter now the Russian naturalist, geographer, literary critic, polymath, and activist, the somewhat saintly Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921). He was 17 years younger than Huxley and 33 years younger than Darwin and was very aware of both. Kropotkin summarized his own ideas in 1902 in Mutual Aid (re-published by Penguin in 2021).Kropotkin hugely admired Darwin but took serious issue with him nonetheless, albeit at arm’s length because as far as I know the two never met, although Kropotkin spent much of his time in England when Russia became too hot for him. (He was imprisoned for his political activism in 1874, escaped in 1876, and spent the next 41 years in exile, not least in what are now the London suburbs of Harrow and Bromley.) In particular, crucially, he felt that at least in Origin of Species Darwin had hugely over-stated the role of competition in shaping evolution, and hugely under-stated the importance of sociability, co-operation — or indeed of “mutual aid”. Thus, he wrote:
“As soon as we study animals … in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains [we] at once perceive that although 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 defence amidst animals belonging to the same species or at least to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle”
In particular, in his younger days, Kropotkin trekked through Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria and, he says,
“Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during [my] journeys. One was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural agencies; and the consequent paucity of life which fell under my observation. And the other was, that even in those few spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to find – although I was eagerly looking for it – that bitter struggle for the means of existence among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinians (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.
On the other hand, wherever I saw animal life in abundance, for instance on the lakes where scores of species and millions of individuals came together to rear their progeny …. I saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution”
Kropotkin in turn was inspired by Karl Kessler (1815-1881), a German biologist with Russian connections, who in 1862 became a professor at Saint Petersburg Imperial University. Kessler also established the Saint Petersburg Society of Naturalists – and in an address to the society in 1879 he said:
“I obviously do not deny the struggle for existence, but I maintain that the progressive development of the animal kingdom, and especially of mankind, is favoured much more by mutual support than by mutual struggle … I am inclined to think that in the evolution of the organic world – in the progressive modification of organic beings – mutual support among individuals plays a much more important part than their mutual struggle”
Kessler should surely be much better known than he is. He developed his ideas further and presented them at a Congress of Russian naturalists in 1880, a few month before his death. But he published his paper only in Russian and as Kropotkin remarked:
“… like so many good things published in the Russian tongue only, that remarkable address remains almost entirely unknown”
However, although Kropotkin so forcefully emphasised nature’s cooperativeness he was a realist. Thus he rejected the idea proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) who, said Kropotkin, saw only “love, peace, and harmony” in nature – harmony that had been “destroyed by the accession of man. For in so doing, said Kropotkin,
“Rousseau had committed the error of excluding the beak-and-claw fight from his thoughts. [But] Huxley committed the opposite error; and neither Rousseau’s optimism nor Huxley’s pessimism can be accepted as an impartial interpretation of nature”
Kropotkin beyond doubt was a very fine naturalist but Darwin, many say, was the greatest of all. Darwin’s thinking overall seems far more nuanced than Huxley’s. So why did he apparently miss what to Kropotkin was so obvious – that life is at least as cooperative as it is competitive?
One answer I suppose is that Malthus got to him first. Inspired by Malthus, Darwin saw competition as a prime driver of natural selection. It was a key strut in his argument.
But he also saw, and stated, that natural selection is not the sole driver of evolution – as he discussed not least in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)in which he launched his idea of sexual selection. He saw too, that competition is not the sole driver of natural selection — and he also saw, and stressed, the importance of cooperativeness in nature, and hence in evolution. Thus, Kropotkin tells us,
“In The Descent of Man … [Darwin] pointed out how, in numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears, and how struggle is replaced by co-operation, and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions or for survival.
He intimated that in such cases the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, for the welfare of the community.
He wrote: ‘Those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring’. The term [struggle for existence] which originated from the narrow Malthusian conception of competition between each and all, thus lost its narrowness in the mind of one who knew Nature”
But, says Kropotkin, perhaps because Darwin was steeped in the “struggle for life” hypothesis, his thoughts on cooperativeness
“ … were overshadowed by the masses of facts gathered for the purpose of illustrating the consequences of a real competition for life”
Were it not for this bias, derived from Malthus, Darwin’s ideas on cooperativeness —
“… might have become the basis of most fruitful researches”
In practice, though, said Kropotkin,
“… the numberless followers of Darwin reduced the notion of struggle for existence to its narrowest limits. They came to conceive the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved individuals, thirsting for one another’s blood. They made modern literature resound with the war-cry of woe to the vanquished, as if it were the last word of modern biology, They raised the ‘pitiless’ struggle for personal advantages to the height of a biological principle which man must submit to as well, under the menace of otherwise succumbing in a world based on mutual extermination. Huxley’s “manifesto for survival”
As for T H Huxley’s Struggle for Existence and its Bearing upon Man, Kropotkin suggests that it’s
“ — a very incorrect representation of the facts of Nature”
Darwin had died by the time Kropotkin made his ideas widely known but they did find favour with other naturalists of the late 19th century including the great H W (Henry) Bates (1825-1892) who spent many heroic years in Amazonia and came up with the idea of “Batesian mimicry”, by which innocuous creatures that are easy prey come to resemble others that have dangerous stings or are poisonous. Bates said of Kropotkin’s ideas —
“Yes, certainly; that is true Darwinism!”
In my formal studies of biology in the 1950s and early ’60s we learnt a lot about Darwin and about Malthus and T H Huxley but nothing about Kropotkin (and only a little about Henry Bates). Modern economists of neoliberal persuasion like to suggest that the ultra-competitive market economy that they have urged upon the rest of us imitates nature and is therefore by definition “natural”. It seems to follow from this that the cooperative and forgiving economy recommended by wishy-washy socialists and left of centre social democrats must be unnatural, and therefore “unrealistic”. But a more nuanced interpretation of nature suggests that the wishy-washies are closer to the truth. The people who fight constantly for supremacy are misguided. And a disproportionate number of those who achieve supremacy are obvious psychopaths.
Darwin should of course be centre stage in the teaching of biology. But so too should Kropotkin. If he was, the course of world history this past century or so would surely have been very different, and the world might now be a much kinder and safer place.
PS:
Modern biologists are wont to stress the role of chance in shaping evolution and are less inclined to suppose that any particular quality, such as measurable intelligence or physical prowess, is bound to lead to ecological success. Thus early 20th century biologists commonly supposed – and taught! – that the mammals came fully into their own from about 65 million years ago because, as warm blooded, agile, and supposedly intelligent creatures like us (and wolves and horses), they inevitably ousted the supposedly dim and clod-hopping dinosaurs that had dominated the Earth for the previous 150 million years or so. But the lineage of synapsid reptiles that led to the mammals is at least as ancient as the lineage of diapsid reptiles that produced the dinosaurs (and birds, and all modern reptiles). For nearly 200 million years indeed the mammals lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs and they began to realize their full potential only after the dinosaurs were, apparently, wiped out by an asteroid that produced a climate that did not suit them. Thus the mammals did not drive out the dinosaurs. They merely occupied the space that dinosaurs had perforce vacated, for reasons that were beyond the influence of either. And of course the birds, which phylogenetically speaking are dinosaurs, and are warm-blooded, cosily feathered, and fly, lived gloriously on.
This general idea is anticipated by the preacher in Ecclesiastes 9.11 who said (in the King James translation):
“I … saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all”
Thus the Old Testament anticipated modern thought by more than 2000 years. But then as Ecclesiastes also comments (4:9):
“…there is no new thing under the sun”
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