The equation of evolution with mutual struggle instead of mutual aid.
An especially odious myth about evolution is the presumption that animals and humans are inherently selfish and that nature, in Tennyson’s memorable description, is “red in tooth and claw.”
After The Origin of Species was published, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer immortalized natural selection in the phrase “survival of the fittest,” one of the most misleading descriptions in the history of science that has been embraced by social Darwinists ever since, applying it inappropriately to racial theory, national politics, and economic doctrines.
Even Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, reinforced what he called this “gladiatorial” view of life in a series of essays, describing nature “whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day.”
This view of life need not have become the dominant one.
In 1902 the Russian anarchist and social commentator Petr Kropotkin published his rebuttal to Spencer and Huxley in his book Mutual Aid.
Calling out Spencer by phrase, for example, Kropotkin notes: “If we . . . ask Nature: ‘who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?’ we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest.
They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization.”
In numerous trips to the wild hinterlands of Siberia, Kropotkin discovered that animal species there were highly social and cooperative in nature, an adaptation for survival that he deduced played a vital role in evolution.
“In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense — not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species.”