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Although from Darwin's later writings, especially The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, it is clear that he recognized that cooperation influences the course of evolution no less than does competition, particularly in humans; it remained for others to demonstrate how widespread is cooperation in the living world. Perhaps no one did more to promote a more balanced attitude toward evolution, at least among English-speaking people, than Prince Piotr Alexeivich Kropotkin, a Russian nobleman and anarchist long resident in England, who in 1902 published Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, the chapters of which had appeared in the preceding decade in the Nineteenth Century.

Kropotkin's work has been condemned as uncritical. At the time he wrote, scarcely any of the patient, systematic, critical field studies of free animals, studies now available in increasing numbers, had been made; he had, perforce, to select most of his examples of mutual aid in the animal world from incidental observations, especially those of travelers and huntsmen. But his approach was essentially sound; and no one can justly accuse him of a one-sided attitude or of failure to recognize the prevalence of conflict in nature. "Rousseau," he wrote, "had committed the error of excluding the beak-and-claw fight from his thoughts; and Huxley committed the opposite error; but neither Rousseau's optimism nor Huxley's pessimism can be accepted as an impartial interpretation of nature." Kropotkin believed that animals associate together not only for the security that numbers give but to increase their enjoyment of life; he surmised that birds often fly in flocks "for the mere pleasure of the flight." Modern biologists are inclined to scorn such notions as unscientific, and to account for all animal associations by their purely utilitarian function of promoting survival and reproduction; but unless creatures find some satisfaction or joy in living, and this increases along with advancing organization, evolutionwhich multiplies their kinds and elevates their organizationis futility on a stupendous scale, signifying nothing.

More recently, W. C. Allee (1951), long of the University of Chicago, explored cooperation in nature, performing with his students many carefully controlled laboratory experiments to demon-

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strate that organisms in groups help one another to survive. He proved that animals, such as goldfish in a tank poisoned with colloidal silver, planarian worms exposed to ultraviolet radiation, or marine worms transferred to fresh water, buffer one another from adverse effects and survive longer if exposed to hazards in groups rather than singly. Sea urchin eggs develop more rapidly when crowded than when scattered; and certain bacteria fail to multiply if too few are inoculated into the culture medium. Accordingly, Allee recognized an "unconscious proto-cooperation" among organisms low on the evolutionary scale and traced its growth into the more advanced cooperation of higher animals. He recognized that for many organisms there is an optimum concentration, neither too sparse nor too crowded, that most promotes vital processes.

In the natural as in the human world, cooperation and competition are so intimately intertwined that it is often difficult to disentangle them. I am impressed with this truth as, through my study window, I gaze out upon the forest dripping from October's torrential rains. The dominant trees in this rain forest compete intensely for a place in the sunlit canopy, where alone some species can flower and set seed freely. Probably not one in ten thousand seedlings succeeds, after many years of patient growth, in thrusting itself up into this privileged position, for which it must often wait until the giant beneath which it germinated dies of old age or falls in a windstorm. Yet these trees, bewildering in variety, that compete so strenuously, create the conditions indispensable for one another's growth.