Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [41]
On the African savannas, baboons travel in large companies, with the females and infants surrounded by the adult males. About twice the size of the females, the males have much bigger canine teeth, useful for defending the troop from leopards and other enemies. Policemen of the society, the dominant males stop fights among their subordinates, often simply by means of a masterful stare. Monkeys also travel in troops, in which childless females eagerly fondle infants not their own. Occasionally, even a male will carry an orphaned baby, as C. R. Carpenter (1934) noticed in the Howling Monkey of tropical America. Living in trees through which they can flee more rapidly than can pursuing mammals, monkeys are less exposed to danger than are the largely terrestrial baboons, and their troops are less tightly organized.
The foregoing examples of cooperation in the living world are only a small selection from the vast body of similar facts that naturalists have gathered, chiefly in the present century; but they amply confirm what Kropotkin tried to prove with the more meager data available when he wrote, that mutual aid is widespread among animals and has powerfully influenced their evolution. Harmonization is active not only within organisms, in their growth and functioning,
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but likewise between them, joining members of a species in cooperative societies and even bringing diverse species together in mutually beneficial associations. This harmonization or pacification of the living world has still not progressed very far; the cooperating groups exist precariously in the midst of strife, and even within them concord is often far from perfect. Yet cooperation no less than competition is widespread in nature, and must receive serious consideration by any evolutionary philosophy.
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5
Exploitation and Cooperation
As we have seen, the living world is full of inconsistencies, or situations that one would not expect to follow from their antecedents. Among its many paradoxes is that organisms which, to the best of their ability, insulate themselves from everything around them nevertheless need surrounding things to support their lives; whereas lifeless objects, which do not separate themselves by special coverings from other things but mingle freely with them, have in general no need of insulation. Rocks, many metals, and the more stable crystals might continue indefinitely to exist in a vacuum; living organisms need constant support by their environment, and most of them are, in one way or another, dependent upon other organisms.
Dependence has degrees. Green plants, able to elaborate their own food by photosynthesis, are far more independent than animals. Their basic needs are sunlight, air, water, and elements dissolved in water or in the soil. Probably most of them could thrive as isolated individuals, as many do scattered through arid deserts, in rock crevices at the highest altitudes where vegetation grows, and in scattered spots almost everywhere. Even those that thrive amid others, like trees in a forest or grasses in a close stand, may grow in isolation, sometimes better when less closely crowded by competitors for sunlight and water. However, many plants are less independent of other organisms than they appear. The tree that stands so proudly all alone may need the mycorrhizal fungi that
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envelop its finer roots to absorb the