There is a very detailed article on this topic by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, titled ‘Kropotkin was no crackpot’. He points out how Kropotkin’s ideas are closer to the current understanding of evolution than the ‘social Darwinism’ and many other popular perceptions of Darwinism.
I agree completely that Kropotkin is more right than your average social Darwinist or nazi, but all three use “evolution” as a concept to further their political interests, and do not correctly portray the reality or nuance of the Darwinian influences on primates societies. There’s a reason he had a reputation for being a crackpot among evolutionary biologists in the first place.
Kropotkin my beloved
Numberless being 0?
Numberless as innumerable.
I’m as much for altruism as anybody else, but as a biologist I can’t pretend that Darwinian evolution promotes unbridled cooperation in groups of primates with no room for selfishness and competition… it is quite the opposite actually. Primate societies tend to be hierarchical and unequal, even within otherwise united groups.
Not to say that Darwinian evolution makes cooperation an impossibility; social conditioning and education overpower evolutionary instincts all over the place in human society. One only needs to look at things like religion and political ideology to understand that evolution and instinct are not the primary movers of human behavior nowadays.
Edit: To be clear, I am not saying that that supposedly Darwinian political beliefs like social Darwinism and naziism are driven by natural human behavior. I just want to point out that Marxist Leninist ideas can’t make that claim either. Almost no human ideas or institutions can. Except for cuckholding. That is a profoundly Darwinian behavior.
Our base instincts tend to function only for populations fewer than one hundred. Once there are more people than your Facebook friend list, people start to get the sense that renegades and degenerates have infiltrated and are corrupting the community.
This means hierarchal system in our post-agrarian non-migratory civilization will always be driven to corruption and injustice, which has so far led universally to the dissolution of civilizations to warfare and collapse.
Maybe well find a way to reshape civilization to end hierarchy so that rule of law applies equally and everyone is assured a minimum standard of life. Until we do humankind will always be only centuries away from catastrophic risk.
