I have a couple of problems with this otherwise interesting article.
First, let’s be clear that John Gould, not Charles Darwin, identified these various birds as all finches. The article mistakenly declares that, “… Darwin noticed small variations in the beaks of a few finches, unlocking, we are told, the mystery of life’s variation over time and space.” In fact, Darwin erroneously believed that the birds were different species and not all finches. It was only after ornithologist Gould corrected him, that Darwin was able to make his insightful deductions.
Second, the article’s statement that, “Scientists are slowly understanding collaboration’s role in biology, which might just help liberate our collective imagination in time to better address the climate crisis”, ignores the fact that some scientists realized that cooperation was an excellent example of fitness from the very inception of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
The article is correct, of course, in stating that many Western scientists have been very slow to recognize this essential element. This is especially true of non-scientists who prefer the non-Darwinian concept developed by Spencer which has been mislabeled “social Darwinism”.
However not all scientists were so foolish. There were always those who were more clear sighted, especially those not quite so prejudiced by the heavily colonialist and racist attitudes that were normative in Western 19th century culture, who realized that fittest did not automatically mean most brutal and most exploitive.
The most famous example being a Russian prince.
> Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species sparked major battles. The most famous may have been between science and religion, but there were disputes within science as well. One of the most heated was whether natural selection favored cooperative or competitive behaviors, a battle that still rages today. For almost 100 years, no single person did more to promote the study of the evolution of cooperation than Peter Kropotkin.
Kropotkin traveled the world talking about the evolution of cooperation, which he called “mutual aid,” in both animals and humans. Sometime the travel was voluntary, but often it wasn’t: He was jailed, banned, or expelled from many of the most respectable countries of his day. For he was not only the face of the science of cooperation, he was also the face of the anarchist movement. He came to believe that his politics and science were united by the law of mutual aid: that cooperation was the predominant evolutionary force driving all social life, from microbes to humans.
... He challenged Darwin’s followers, most notably Thomas Henry Huxley, and their claims that natural selection almost always led to competition. Yes, Kropotkin admitted, sometimes that happens, especially in the tropics, but mutual aid was just as common, if not more so. <
Ultimately Krepotkin agreed with the point of the first article. We must learn to cooperate in order to better solve the problems of humanity.
> But what Kropotkin cared about more than anything was that understanding mutual aid in animals might shed light on human cooperation and perhaps help save humanity from destroying itself. Whether that happens remains to be seen. <
The important point here is to recognize that survival of the fittest means exactly that. Survival of those most fit to survive. Being fit to survive may or may not be related to cooperation. It may or may not be related to fierceness. Fitness depends upon the environmental circumstances in which an organism is set.
For example, complex life is all eukaryotic life. And what is a eukaryote? It’s a cell that has a nucleus and other organelles contained within it. So how did that situation evolve? It is widely accepted that symbiosis between a bacterium and a procaryote occurred, probably by accident. Possibly by one eating the other and failing to digest it!
In other words, all complex life is based on two formerly competitive lifeforms learning to cooperate. Survival of the fittest. Survival of the most cooperative.
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