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The thing is Kropotkin's actual book presented it as a scientific principle of evolution, which is nonsense. Yes, there are biological examples of cooperation (

The thing is Kropotkin's actual book presented it as a scientific principle of evolution, which is nonsense. Yes, there are biological examples of cooperation (such as eusocial insects like bees and ants), but this only works because of the unusual reproductive strategy they use where all the members of a hive are siblings. That doesn't mean that humans can't choose to cooperate, but this choice has nothing to do with biology or evolution.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Arguably all multicellular life on earth is an example of biological cooperation.
- _aavaa_ 4y ago
  If you are looking at the cells of that multicellular life. But if you look between multicellular organisms it's not so cut and dry. The lion and its prey are in cooperation only in some abstract sense of keeping their shared ecosystem alive, but are very much antagonistic in practice.
  - hourago 4y ago
    > The lion and its prey are in cooperation only... Lions cooperate with other lions, humans cooperate with dogs, symbiotic organisms are all over the planet. Humans are apex cooperators. Our civilization, from planes to schools, from the banana that you eat this morning to the microchips of your computers, all comes from a very complex cooperation between humans. Remove the trust to cooperate and we go back to live in caverns. Nobody cooperates better than humans, ants or bees cooperation is just on basic functions, we are way better than that.
  - 7952 4y ago
    The mammalian genes survive regardless. The gene for having a neocortex survives in both lions and antelope. And that survival may be at the expense of other more distant species.
- zajio1am 4y ago
  but between cells that have the same genome.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Or biological totalitarianism. Is easy for your privileged brain and nerve cells to claim such high-minded ideals. Meanwhile, your skin cells are treated as disposable and have a medium lifespan of 14 days
  - pasquinelli 4y ago
    that must mean there's a class of cells that keep skin cells in their station. which cells are those?
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > which cells are those? Macrophages, though your immune system broadly [1]. (Every cell has a variety of programmed death processes built in, too.) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis
    - none_to_remain 4y ago
      When cells try to "get above their station," it's called cancer, and there are classes of cells and other mechanisms in the body constantly fighting against it.
      - pasquinelli 4y ago
        why'd you put "get above their station" in quotes? is it because the whole metaphor is kind of stupid?
        none_to_remain 4y ago
        I was merely setting the metaphor apart from the rest. I'm not sure if the metaphor is stupid or not.
- OscarCunningham 4y ago
  Even singled celled life is cooperation between the many genes using those cells to reproduce.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    At that level personification of biology breaks down completely. Genes are not cooperating. Genes are pieces of a self-replicating pattern. Those patterns get shuffled and mixed a lot, but they also just get copied over and over even more. Some patterns are easier/faster to copy than others, and some are uncopyable. Over time, some patterns remain stable while others disappear, but that's not a result of work and cooperation - it's just a purely statistical phenomenon.
RandomLensman 4y ago
Humans are biologically non-social?
wpietri 4y ago
I'm sure his science is bunk. But I'll note that no less a person than E O Wilson argues that humans are eusocial: https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/human-eusociality/ https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/human-eusociality/
7952 4y ago
That implies that there is a minimum set of relatedness that is required for alturism to improve survival. That is just not true. And it is not just about direct relatedness but shared genes.
tremon 4y ago
In more traditional societies, the family is the primary social structure (and support structure). It's only in "modern" society that we let go of that idea and handed the responsibility over to government. And when said government fails, family is the first thing people fall back on. So I wouldn't be too sure that humans are biologically solitary animals.
AndrewKemendo 4y ago
Humanity spent 200,000 years living communally in social abundance. This is settled science in anthropology and biology [1][2][3] Social community is an essential requirement for human life and the loss of community has now been used as proof of some kind of lamarckian anti-social evolution which has zero evidence. [1] Chan, E.K.F., et al. human origins in a southern African palaeo-wetland and first migrations. Nature 575,185–189 (2019) [2] Graeber, David, Wingrow, David (2021), The Dawn of Everything. (126) [3] Sahlins, Marshall (2009). Hunter-gatherers: insights from a golden affluent age. Pacific Ecologist. 18: 3–8
- coding123 4y ago
  The everyone is out for themselves, greed is king, insurance instead of family, sue thy neighbor is not backed by evidence? who knew?
- goatlover 4y ago
  If social community/communal existence is an essential requirement, then how do you explain the past several thousand years, where civilization has come to dominate, and the human population has grown to 8 billion? Civilization didn't just develop in the middle east, it cropped up separately in several different regions, including the Americas.
  - ves 4y ago
    Competition in its recognizably modern form only recently became the foundational organizational system for civilization, and civilization “won” because (in part) a) it generally has no problem deploying incredible levels of violence and coercion, against people and the environment, and b) it promotes continuous population increase, even beyond what may be sustainable. There’s about a million places to source this, but I might start with something like James C. Scott.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      Competition for resources and violence is seen in primates and many mammals. Smaller social groups does not necessarily remove this element. The main difference with humans is that we are capable of organizing and coordinating larger social structures. Large Organizations of individuals require other large organizations to defend against
cycomanic 4y ago
The book was a direct answer to social darwinism (which has very much been proven to be bunk, but many people still argue like this almost a 100 years later), not to contradict darwinism. I'm not sure what exactly you call bunk, Kropotkins whole point was that for many species communal support and altruistic behavior is an integral part of their existence. That does not only apply to hive societies. There are for example many bird species where young (often males) help with raising children even they are not their own. Similarly you can find many mammals who live in larger communities and where individulas exhibit "altruistic" behavior because it is to the advantage of the survival of the community.
cycomanic 4y ago
Its pretty rich to dismiss Kropotkins theories as bunk without evidence btw. He is actually recognised in biology for his contributions: see [1]. I mean Stephen Jay Gould one of the most eminent evolutionary biologists wrote an essay about him tilled Kropotkins was no crackpot [2] [1] https://www.rsb.org.uk/biologist-features/who-was-peter-kropothkin https://www.rsb.org.uk/biologist-features/who-was-peter-krop... [2] https://digitallibrary.amnh.org/handle/2246/6494?show=full https://digitallibrary.amnh.org/handle/2246/6494?show=full
- slibhb 4y ago
  Gould is a controversial figure. He was a popularizer who mixed politics and science to a degree that made some uncomfortable.
sbierwagen 4y ago
>because of the unusual reproductive strategy they use where all the members of a hive are siblings Specifically, eusocial insects are haplodiploidic, where workers are more related to each other (sharing 75% of their genes) than they would be to their own children, which reduces the genetic incentive to defect from the cooperative structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy This sounds outrageously strange, but something similar can happen in humans: identical twins are also more related to each other than to their children.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

Arguably all multicellular life on earth is an example of biological cooperation.

_aavaa_ 4y ago
If you are looking at the cells of that multicellular life. But if you look between multicellular organisms it's not so cut and dry. The lion and its prey are in cooperation only in some abstract sense of keeping their shared ecosystem alive, but are very much antagonistic in practice.
- hourago 4y ago
  > The lion and its prey are in cooperation only... Lions cooperate with other lions, humans cooperate with dogs, symbiotic organisms are all over the planet. Humans are apex cooperators. Our civilization, from planes to schools, from the banana that you eat this morning to the microchips of your computers, all comes from a very complex cooperation between humans. Remove the trust to cooperate and we go back to live in caverns. Nobody cooperates better than humans, ants or bees cooperation is just on basic functions, we are way better than that.
- 7952 4y ago
  The mammalian genes survive regardless. The gene for having a neocortex survives in both lions and antelope. And that survival may be at the expense of other more distant species.
zajio1am 4y ago
but between cells that have the same genome.
s1artibartfast 4y ago
Or biological totalitarianism. Is easy for your privileged brain and nerve cells to claim such high-minded ideals. Meanwhile, your skin cells are treated as disposable and have a medium lifespan of 14 days
- pasquinelli 4y ago
  that must mean there's a class of cells that keep skin cells in their station. which cells are those?
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > which cells are those? Macrophages, though your immune system broadly [1]. (Every cell has a variety of programmed death processes built in, too.) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis
  - none_to_remain 4y ago
    When cells try to "get above their station," it's called cancer, and there are classes of cells and other mechanisms in the body constantly fighting against it.
    - pasquinelli 4y ago
      why'd you put "get above their station" in quotes? is it because the whole metaphor is kind of stupid?
      - none_to_remain 4y ago
        I was merely setting the metaphor apart from the rest. I'm not sure if the metaphor is stupid or not.
OscarCunningham 4y ago
Even singled celled life is cooperation between the many genes using those cells to reproduce.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  At that level personification of biology breaks down completely. Genes are not cooperating. Genes are pieces of a self-replicating pattern. Those patterns get shuffled and mixed a lot, but they also just get copied over and over even more. Some patterns are easier/faster to copy than others, and some are uncopyable. Over time, some patterns remain stable while others disappear, but that's not a result of work and cooperation - it's just a purely statistical phenomenon.

RandomLensman 4y ago

Humans are biologically non-social?

wpietri 4y ago

I'm sure his science is bunk. But I'll note that no less a person than E O Wilson argues that humans are eusocial: https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/human-eusociality/ https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/human-eusociality/

7952 4y ago

That implies that there is a minimum set of relatedness that is required for alturism to improve survival. That is just not true. And it is not just about direct relatedness but shared genes.

tremon 4y ago

In more traditional societies, the family is the primary social structure (and support structure). It's only in "modern" society that we let go of that idea and handed the responsibility over to government. And when said government fails, family is the first thing people fall back on. So I wouldn't be too sure that humans are biologically solitary animals.

AndrewKemendo 4y ago

Humanity spent 200,000 years living communally in social abundance. This is settled science in anthropology and biology [1][2][3] Social community is an essential requirement for human life and the loss of community has now been used as proof of some kind of lamarckian anti-social evolution which has zero evidence. [1] Chan, E.K.F., et al. human origins in a southern African palaeo-wetland and first migrations. Nature 575,185–189 (2019) [2] Graeber, David, Wingrow, David (2021), The Dawn of Everything. (126) [3] Sahlins, Marshall (2009). Hunter-gatherers: insights from a golden affluent age. Pacific Ecologist. 18: 3–8

coding123 4y ago
The everyone is out for themselves, greed is king, insurance instead of family, sue thy neighbor is not backed by evidence? who knew?
goatlover 4y ago
If social community/communal existence is an essential requirement, then how do you explain the past several thousand years, where civilization has come to dominate, and the human population has grown to 8 billion? Civilization didn't just develop in the middle east, it cropped up separately in several different regions, including the Americas.
- ves 4y ago
  Competition in its recognizably modern form only recently became the foundational organizational system for civilization, and civilization “won” because (in part) a) it generally has no problem deploying incredible levels of violence and coercion, against people and the environment, and b) it promotes continuous population increase, even beyond what may be sustainable. There’s about a million places to source this, but I might start with something like James C. Scott.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Competition for resources and violence is seen in primates and many mammals. Smaller social groups does not necessarily remove this element. The main difference with humans is that we are capable of organizing and coordinating larger social structures. Large Organizations of individuals require other large organizations to defend against

cycomanic 4y ago

The book was a direct answer to social darwinism (which has very much been proven to be bunk, but many people still argue like this almost a 100 years later), not to contradict darwinism. I'm not sure what exactly you call bunk, Kropotkins whole point was that for many species communal support and altruistic behavior is an integral part of their existence. That does not only apply to hive societies. There are for example many bird species where young (often males) help with raising children even they are not their own. Similarly you can find many mammals who live in larger communities and where individulas exhibit "altruistic" behavior because it is to the advantage of the survival of the community.

cycomanic 4y ago

Its pretty rich to dismiss Kropotkins theories as bunk without evidence btw. He is actually recognised in biology for his contributions: see [1]. I mean Stephen Jay Gould one of the most eminent evolutionary biologists wrote an essay about him tilled Kropotkins was no crackpot [2] [1] https://www.rsb.org.uk/biologist-features/who-was-peter-kropothkin https://www.rsb.org.uk/biologist-features/who-was-peter-krop... [2] https://digitallibrary.amnh.org/handle/2246/6494?show=full https://digitallibrary.amnh.org/handle/2246/6494?show=full

slibhb 4y ago
Gould is a controversial figure. He was a popularizer who mixed politics and science to a degree that made some uncomfortable.

sbierwagen 4y ago

>because of the unusual reproductive strategy they use where all the members of a hive are siblings Specifically, eusocial insects are haplodiploidic, where workers are more related to each other (sharing 75% of their genes) than they would be to their own children, which reduces the genetic incentive to defect from the cooperative structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy This sounds outrageously strange, but something similar can happen in humans: identical twins are also more related to each other than to their children.