Talk:Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution/Archive 1

Written in English?
Did Kropotkin write Mutual Aid in English? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Special:Contributions/ (talk)

I'm not absolutely certain, not having a copy handy, but I don't believe so. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Special:Contributions/ (talk)


 * The preface to my 1998 Freedom Press edition says "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution was first published by William Heinemann in London in October 1902. It was soon published in the United States and translated into several languages." (my emphasis) I believe it was originally published in English. Mike Dillon 04:46, 27 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Kropotkin's introduction says that the individual chapters were originally published in Nineteenth Century (an English language publication) between 1890 and 1896, so I'm certain it was published in English. Mike Dillon 06:24, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
 * i am fairly certain that mutual aid was written in english. PK was living in london at the time and did a lot of his work in english; maybe all. freedom was english language. --Lquilter (talk) 15:17, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Extreme imbalance
Who the hell is Gould! (Just a rhetoric outburst, don't answer!) This article is supposed to be about a book by Peter Kropotkin, and half the article is about Stephen Jay Gould! Is the message from Peter Kropotkin in any way controversial, so that Stephen Jay Gould must take more place than Kropotkin's book? Then, since most criticism of Kropotkin is probably anachronistic according to Kropotkin's standpoint and the debate that Kropotkin follows (yes I have read it and he doesn't attack Darwins theories directly!) is probably a specific 19th century debate, I cannot understand why Stephen Jay Gould takes so much place here. His arguments should be about one paragraph, not an entire section. Gould deserves about one paragraph, not more: he is considered inventive and stimulating the debate, but his vindications seem to be extreme.

Is this about the neoliberalisms defence against the emerging evolutionary knowledge about the sociobiology of solidarity? Then it is not the first time that politics tries to usurp science, as was already done by Huxley et al. kidnapping "Darwinism". ... said: Rursus ( m bork³ ) 11:27, 22 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I POV-marked the article. I don't think that the imbalance is intentional, it is just based on too little text about the book and Kropotkin point of view.


 * More text about the book, which is a long list of examples of "solidarity institutions" from mostly animals, f.ex. pelicans' kindergardens, but also from various human cultures. He also argues that the competition is overstated in Darwin's discourse and that collaboration is severely understated. He doesn't contradict the Darwinian theory, he just downplay the competitive factor and claims that mutual aid is an as important factor in the evolution of animals and humankind.


 * Downplay Gould, which is not mainstream among evolution biologist because his stress of chaos and randomness is often overstating the uniqueness of lost taxa, while it is more common to see lost taxa as early branches related to living ones, among evolutionists in general.


 * Add other criticisms if available. There should be more criticisms from various directions: Kropotkin was politically controversial, and still is a little. Well sourced political criticism should of course be welcome, but I would also prefer various modern evolutionism criticism, if it is mainstream. ... said: Rursus ( m bork³  ) 11:44, 22 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I retract my stmts about Huxley based from source Stephen Jay Gould 1997, he was a moral man not trying to usurp. But he didn't regard society as an evolutionary product, as I do, so I misunderstood his view. ... said: Rursus ( m bork³ ) 13:08, 22 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I must also retract my kind of criticism against Gould. He is pretty reliable regarding evolution, but he has been quite aggressive against all attempts (leftist and rightist) to interpret social behavior in terms of evolution. Noble, but I believe he went too far. ... said: Rursus ( m bork³ ) 15:12, 22 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Besides Gould is partially wrong in "We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night", both me and Kroptkin were/are bearded, stalking around in the dark, prepared to throw verbal bombs here and there. ... said: Rursus ( m bork³ ) 13:13, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

Biological criticism and acknowledgement
All reference to actual biology was previously removed from this page, which is shameful. I have tried to succinctly summarize the relevant biology, including citations which were previously on this page. As Kropotkin's book makes claims about biological organization, and derives arguments from them, it is important that we recognize biologist comments on Kropotkin's work and assess its place relative to modern biology. I think my attempt both quickly diagnoses the faults and value of Kropotkin's work, and does so without unfairly dominating the page. --2602:30A:2EA0:D9F0:6DC0:4A87:F76C:1DA1 (talk) 14:40, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

Revision to improve style and elaborate key points
I made a set of small changes based mainly on my reading of the book. I thought the previous revision glossed over the substance of the contribution to Anarchist philosophy and inadequately specified Kropotkin's anticipation of major threads of biological inquiry. I made some small efforts to improving this. There is still a lot of room to improve the article. The book has some 4000 citations on Google scholar so there is clearly some room for further improvement. Groceryheist (talk) 21:42, 26 December 2017 (UTC)