Following the previous post on a potentially revolutionary platform for scientific collaboration, it is worth reflecting on a rather extraordinary bibliometric fact. Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, first published in 1902, continues to be cited more than a century later more than one hundred times per year.
That longevity raises an intriguing question, how many scientists and thinkers are still cited with such regularity more than a century after their deaths? More importantly, it suggests that the central argument of the book has lost little of its relevance. Kropotkin challenged the crude idea that evolution is driven only by ruthless competition, emphasizing instead the importance of cooperation, reciprocity and mutual assistance in the survival and flourishing of both animal and human societies. Perhaps that is why a book written more than 120 years ago continues to speak to us. In a world that so often treats competition as an unavoidable law of life, Mutual Aid offers a more hopeful lesson, our capacity to cooperate, support one another and flourish together may be no less deeply rooted in evolution than our capacity for conflict.
