Читать книгу Mutual Aid - Pablo Servigne - Страница 30

There has been a real paradigm shift in sociobiology. Its founding father, Edward O. Wilson, with the help of excellent theorists and in the light of new discoveries in the field and the laboratory, recently ‘flipped’ his theory by reversing its basic assumption. The origin of the ‘social fact’ is no longer to be found in genes, but in the influence of the environment. From then on, some scientists began to recognize the importance of Kropotkin’s work, especially as he highlighted the importance of the environment in the evolution of mutual aid.

Thanks to this abundance of new studies, we can finally see the complexity of the general picture of mutual aid and gradually start to weave connections between disciplines. Among the most significant advances, let us cite the pioneering work of the experimental economist Ernst Fehr, the discoveries on primates made by Frans de Waal, Michael Tomasello and Felix Warneken, political scientist Elinor Ostrom’s surprising findings on ‘the commons’, and the advances in neuroscience made by Tania Singer and Jean Decety, not forgetting the investigations into comparative anthropology conducted by Joe Heinrich in other human cultures. Even genetics has become acceptable again thanks to the remarkable mechanisms of epigenetics, which show how the environment and culture play an important role in gene expression.

We will be exploring all of this in the following chapters.