Читать книгу Mutual Aid - Pablo Servigne - Страница 27

It would be unfair to say that science in the twentieth century was totally blind to mutual aid and beneficial interactions between species. But it was a slow and complicated process. Schematically, we could distinguish three major periods. The first, from Kropotkin to the 1970s (including two major conflicts and the beginning of the Cold War), was marked by an accumulation of observations, but also by a cruel lack of any theoretical framework, models or experiments. The second period, which started with the gene’s ascendancy in the post-war period, led in the 1970s to the birth of sociobiology, a very controversial discipline which set itself the goal of understanding animal and human societies through the prism of genetics. The third period, which began in the 2000s, was characterized by a real escalation in the number of experiments relating to the mechanisms of mutual aid, in particular thanks to advances in experimental economics, political science, primatology and neuroscience, as well as the explosion of molecular genetics, which confirmed the long-standing omnipresence of symbiosis. The 2000s also saw the collapse of the theoretical house of cards comprised by 1970s gene-dominated sociobiology, with the emergence of a slew of mathematical and computer models which have very recently given rise to a ‘new sociobiology’, more complete, more credible and more stimulating, which we will examine in more detail later.