Cover: British biologist Julian Huxley addressing the Zoological Society in 1942. President and vice-president of the British Eugenics Society, a school of thought that reappropriated Darwinism to justify the reproduction of people considered fit, while hindering the procreation of those they deemed inferior. Photography: Felix Man.
Translated by Kurt McLean
Life did not conquer the planet through combat,
but through cooperation.
Life forms associated with one another
to achieve higher levels of complexity and creativity.
— Lynn Margulis
Modern biology did not appear in a vacuum, it was constituted as a science at a precise historical moment: the industrial 19th century, traversed by colonial expansion, the consolidation of capitalism, and faith in progress as an inevitable horizon. In that context, scientific theories did not merely describe the natural world; they also engaged—sometimes explicitly, sometimes silently—with the social imaginaries of their time.
The publication of Charles Darwin's on the Origin of Species in 1859 marked a turning point. The theory of natural selection offered a powerful explanation for the transformation of species over time, based on variation, inheritance, and adaptation to changing conditions. However, before long, Darwin’s proposal was interpreted through a particular lens: that of an era that conceived history as a race, development as accumulation, and survival as victory.
It was not Darwin who claimed that life advanced through conquest, nor who proposed a hierarchy of moral value among living beings. Rather, it was the reception of his theory that inscribed it within a broader narrative, aligned with the industrial imaginary: nature understood as a stage for permanent competition, where only the fittest manage to prevail. Natural selection was thus translated into an epic of winners and losers, and the complexity of biological bonds was subordinated to the logic of the struggle for existence.
Even though On the Origin of Species was a foundational work, capable of presenting overwhelming evidence in favor of natural selection to the scientific community and the general public, Darwin never offered an explanation for the emergence of new species in terms of the generation of heritable novelty. In fact, Darwin himself avoided the term "evolution," preferring to speak of "descent with modification," leaving open the problem of how qualitatively new life forms emerge. Darwin himself wrote: "Anyone whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to a certain number of facts will undoubtedly reject my theory" (On the Origin of Species, 1859).
It was only decades later, between 1930 and 1960, when neo-Darwinism—known as the "modern synthesis"—attributed evolutionary change primarily to random mutation, retrospectively fixing a reading that Darwin had never formulated in that way. Over time, this competitive reading ceased to be one interpretation among others and began to function as the dominant narrative. Life was narrated as a linear process oriented toward progress, and conflict was elevated to an almost exclusive explanatory principle. In that shift, the Darwinian framework—prior to its neo-Darwinian codification—moved from describing biological dynamics to offering a grammar for thinking about the social, economic, and political order of the modern world.
Theory of Evolution
The question, then, is not whether conflict exists in nature—which would be obvious—but why conflict was made the central axis of the evolutionary narrative. What historical conditions made it possible for competition to become the privileged language for explaining life? And what other forms of relation were relegated, invisibilized, or considered marginal because they did not fit the image of a world in permanent forward race?
It was a profound epistemological error: the confusion between a historically situated metaphor and a fundamental biological mechanism, whose consolidation responded to a historical-hermeneutical gesture that crystallized a reading aligned with the power structures of its time. A reading that transformed a situated theory into an explanatory dogma and reduced the diversity of biological relations to a single legitimate narrative. Therein lies the problem this essay seeks to explore: not the transformation of the living as a phenomenon, but the story that was told—and is still told—to explain it.
When Competition Becomes Dogma
The decisive shift did not occur when competition was recognized as one of the multiple dynamics present in nature, but when it began to operate as a total explanatory principle. What in original Darwinian theory appeared as one condition among others (variation, adaptation, contingency) was progressively elevated to a universal key capable of giving meaning to every form of life. In this process, competition ceased to be a partial description and became a dogma.
This dogma was not imposed solely by the force of empirical evidence, but by its affinity with a particular way of conceiving history. On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 in London by John Murray, in the heart of the British Empire, and circulated from the outset in the same editorial and scientific spaces that articulated the liberal and industrial imaginary of the 19th century. It was in this context—and not in Darwin's text—that competition began to acquire a normative status. The term "survival of the fittest," coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864, directly transferred the categories of economic liberalism to the natural realm. Through Anglophone journals such as Nature and the subsequent consolidation of academic biology in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, this competitive reading ceased to be one possible interpretation and became dogma. Life came to be narrated as progress, selection as universal law, and hierarchy as natural outcome.
In a society organized around unlimited growth, accumulation, and hierarchy, it seemed logical to interpret nature under the same scheme. Life was then conceived as a relentless race, a succession of trials in which only some managed to advance, while others were relegated or disappeared. Progress operated first as an economic hypothesis—linked to accumulation, expansion, and growth—and was then translated into a historical hypothesis that retrospectively organized the becoming of societies and of life, only to become a naturalized horizon.
When a scientific narrative reaches that status, it ceases to be questioned. It becomes common sense. Competition, elevated to a general law, began to function as a self-sufficient explanation: everything could be read through it, and whatever did not fit fell outside the field of the thinkable. Relations of cooperation, coexistence, or interdependence were not explicitly denied, but were considered secondary, episodic, or irrelevant compared to the supposed central logic of struggle.
This gesture had consequences far broader than the field of biology. By becoming a single narrative, the competitive explanation of life offered a legitimate language for thinking about social organization. Hierarchies appeared as inevitable, inequality as a natural effect, and the elimination of the "less fit" as part of a necessary order. Natural selection was incorporated into a pre-existing interpretive framework that transformed a biological description into a historical justification: biology began to speak the same vocabulary as political economy and the philosophy of progress.
Thus, the question of life was reduced to a single authorized narrative. Not because it was the only possible one, but because other ways of describing biological relations found no place from which to be heard. The complexity of bonds, the persistence of cooperative forms, and the coexistence of diverse strategies were subordinated to an explanatory framework that no longer admitted fissures.
When a theory ceases to be a tool for thinking and becomes a compulsory grammar, science loses part of its critical capacity. Competition, transformed into dogma, not only organized the reading of nature but also established the limits of what could be said about life itself. It is against this closure—and not against evolutionary theory as such—that the interventions of Piotr Kropotkin and, later, Lynn Margulis emerge.
Kropotkin: Debating the Reading, Not Life
Piotr Kropotkin intervenes in this scenario not as a detractor of Darwinian thought, but as a critical reader of its historical reception. His gesture does not consist of denying the existence of conflict in nature nor of opposing struggle with an idealized image of universal harmony. What he calls into question is something else: the reduction of life to a single legitimate narrative and the conversion of that narrative into dogma.
Piotr Kropotkin wrote Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution outside the Anglo-Saxon imperial center, both geographically and intellectually. The text emerges as a response to a specific reading of Darwinism that, by the end of the 19th century, had already been filtered through the industrial and liberal imaginary. This reading, formulated and popularized by authors such as Herbert Spencer—who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest"—and reinforced by Thomas H. Huxley in his emphasis on the "struggle for existence," turned competition into an almost exclusive explanatory principle. Kropotkin does not debate Darwin, but the Spencerian and Huxleyan reception of his work.
Industrial Revolution in England.
Mutual Aid was not developed from the industrial centers of European liberalism, but from a scientific and lived experience situated on the margins. Kropotkin had traveled extensively through Siberia and Northern Asia as a geographer for the Russian Geographical Society, observing animals and human communities in extreme climatic conditions where survival was sustained through persistent relations of interdependence. Pursued by the Tsarist regime and later exiled, he published between 1890 and 1896 a series of essays in The Nineteenth Century—a London-based journal of intellectual and political debate, distinct from the specialized scientific spaces where the competitive reading of Darwinism was becoming orthodox—later gathered into a book. Faced with a Darwinism already filtered by the Anglo-Saxon industrial imaginary, his intervention does not deny the struggle for existence but questions its elevation to an exclusive and universal principle.
Kropotkin observes that competition, elevated to a universal explanatory principle, not only impoverishes the understanding of biological processes but also reflects almost mimetically the social order of its time. Against that reading, his work does not propose an alternative law of nature but rather an expansion of the field of the visible.
Far from destroying Darwin, Kropotkin draws on empirical observation to show that cooperation is not an anecdotal exception but a persistent dimension of life in multiple ecological contexts. The forms of mutual aid he documents—in animals and in human communities—do not seek to replace competition as an absolute principle but to interrupt its explanatory monopoly. Nature, he suggests, cannot be reduced to a single logic.
It is essential to emphasize that Mutual Aid does not posit an eternal ontology nor moralize nature. Kropotkin does not claim that solidarity is the destiny of life nor propose replacing natural selection with an alternative principle. His intervention is historical and polemical: he shows that competition was elevated to dogma because it fit a specific social order. Competition was not false; it was insufficient and, above all, had been overrepresented.
In Kropotkin's words: "To recognize the ruthless inner struggle for existence within each species and to consider such warfare as a condition of progress would mean accepting something that has not only not been demonstrated but is by no means confirmed by direct observation." In this sense, mutual aid operates as a scientific counter-narrative against a narrative closure. It introduces a persistent discomfort: evidence that life is more complex, more ambiguous, and more relational than the dominant narrative allowed. That discomfort does not aim to found a new certainty but to reopen a question that had been closed.
Kropotkin's intervention does not seek to solve the problem of life but to destabilize the certainty with which people had begun to speak of it. By discussing the reception of Darwinism—not biological processes themselves, but the historical way in which they were delimited, hierarchized, and narrated—he shifts the debate from the terrain of universal laws to that of historical narratives. It is in that fissure, opened at the end of the 19th century, that his critical power resides, and from which he can be read today—not as a formulator of a transhistorical natural law, but as one of the thinkers who, from a situated intervention, durably reconfigured the way of thinking about the relation among life, cooperation, and social organization.
Margulis: A Rupture from Within Biology
Nearly seven decades later, three full generations of thought later, in a profoundly transformed scientific field, Lynn Margulis introduced a discomfort of a different nature, though structurally akin. Her intervention did not arise from social critique or political philosophy, but from within evolutionary biology itself. Margulis did not write against capitalism or the state; she wrote against a historical reduction of the phenomenon of life that had consolidated as an almost unquestionable explanation.
Lynn Margulis intervenes from a different but structurally comparable position. She writes from within the U.S. university system, as a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and from the institutional heart of 20th-century biology. Yet her work does not fit into the disciplinary axis that had consolidated the neo-Darwinian synthesis. The theory of symbiogenesis—formulated from cell biology, microbiology, and cytology—challenged the explanatory core of evolution as it had been fixed by population genetics.
This discomfort was also reflected in editorial circuits. For decades, Margulis's work encountered systematic resistance in scientific journals that functioned as spaces for the canonization of neo-Darwinism, such as Nature or Science. Her articles circulated instead in journals considered lateral or specialized—Journal of Theoretical Biology, Biosystems, Symbiosis—as well as in books and interdisciplinary collections. There was an explicit disciplinary exclusion from the circuits of scientific legitimation, not for lack of evidence, but because symbiogenesis overflowed the mathematical models and competitive metaphors on which orthodoxy had been built. It disordered a narrative that was too well established
Lynn Margulis.
From that position, Margulis did not deny natural selection or the existence of conflict, but she decisively shifted the causal axis of evolution. The core of her proposal—the theory of symbiogenesis—challenged one of the most deeply rooted assumptions of the dominant evolutionary narrative: the idea that complexity arises solely through the gradual accumulation of small competitive advantages. By showing that the eukaryotic cell—the compartmentalized cellular unit that made complex, multicellular life possible—is the result of processes of symbiotic integration among distinct organisms, Margulis shifted the explanatory focus, previously centered on individual competition, toward processes of co-constitution, coexistence, and interdependence decisive for the evolutionary history of complex life.
This shift was not received as a mere theoretical expansion. For years, Margulis's work was marginalized, ridiculed, or dismissed for not fitting the hegemonic explanatory framework. Evolution, as it had been told, left no room for a history of fusions, lasting associations, and collective transformations that could not be described as victories of some over others. The initial resistance to her theory represented a paradigmatic rupture with the narrative core of the Modern Synthesis: it challenged the idea that individual competition was the sole and sufficient engine of evolutionary novelty.
It is important to insist: Margulis did not claim that symbiosis explained all of evolution, nor that competition was irrelevant. Her gesture was more precise and, for that reason, more disturbing: she showed that the dominant narrative of evolution had been narrow, reductionist, and functional to an idea of progress inherited from the 19th century, even though 20th-century molecular biology had already called many of its premises into crisis. Her work revealed an uncomfortable truth: technical progress does not guarantee conceptual progress. A science can renew its instruments while perpetuating, intact, the foundational stories of its explanatory power.
Instead of a linear history oriented toward optimization, Margulis's work forces us to think of life as a web of contingent relations, unstable assemblages, and unexpected alliances. Evolution then appears not as a race toward perfection but as an open history of forced coexistences, mutual adaptations, and shared transformations. There is no promise of harmony here, but an insistence on the irreducible complexity of the living.
The rupture that Margulis introduces is not external to science but internal to its mode of narrating itself. The endosymbiotic theory establishes a fundamental mechanism that reconfigures the explanatory core of the origin of complexity and without which it is impossible to understand the emergence of complex and multicellular life.
Structural Affinity, Not Identity
Bringing Kropotkin and Margulis into dialogue does not imply drawing a direct line of continuity between their works nor attributing to them a shared identity that they never claimed. Margulis was not an anarchist; Kropotkin was not a molecular biologist. Their trajectories, their languages, and their fields of intervention were different, as were the concrete problems they responded to. Forcing an equivalence between them would be to commit the same gesture that this essay seeks to question: the reduction of difference to a single schema.
The point of contact lies in a structural affinity: both interrupt, from different places and at different historical moments, the same kind of narrative. A narrative that conceives life—biological or social—as a sequence oriented by accumulation, conquest, and hierarchy.
In Kropotkin's case, that interruption occurs by discussing the reception of Darwinism in an industrial society that had naturalized competition as an organizing principle. In Margulis's case, the fissure appears by questioning an evolutionary biology that, even with new instruments and languages, continued to narrate the complexity of life under schemes inherited from the 19th century. In both cases, what is put in tension is not the existence of conflict but its explanatory monopoly.
This affinity should not be mistaken for a coincidence of aims or a shared promise. While Kropotkin discussed the ideological reception of Darwinism and deactivated its use as a historical justification of social order, Margulis intervened directly in the heart of evolutionary biology: she displaced competition from the explanatory center and showed that the great evolutionary leaps of life emerge from processes of symbiogenesis. In neither case is an alternative teleology founded, but it becomes impossible to sustain the absolute centrality of conflict as the engine of life.
Shifting the explanatory axis of evolution is not an innocuous theoretical gesture: it implies that many of the legal, ecological, and administrative categories with which "life is regulated" today—including nations' ecological balance laws—were built on an incomplete understanding of how the living works.
Recognizing that the great evolutionary changes that made complex life possible occurred through processes of symbiogenesis is not a metaphor nor an ethical stance: it is a central biological thesis. Margulis's theory decisively displaces competition from the explanatory core of evolution, without denying it, but depriving it of its status as the main engine of evolutionary novelty.
In Acquiring Genomes, written with Dorion Sagan, she argues that "the main source of heritable variation is not random mutation" but the acquisition of complete genomes through symbiogenetic processes, and that it is through these symbiotic integrations that major evolutionary novelties emerge. The complexity of life—that "main source of evolutionary novelty" that Darwin sought—is not explained, then, by the gradual accumulation of small competitive advantages, but by lasting biological fusions that irreversibly transform the organisms involved. Competition and conflict exist, but they cease to occupy the place of governing principle: they do not, by themselves, produce new species or new forms of complex life. What Margulis displaces is not a nuance of the dominant narrative but its causal axis.
The crucial point here is not to derive a social norm from biology, but to recognize that for more than a century, stories about life were built from metaphors that contemporary biology itself has rendered unsustainable. Speaking of structural affinity also allows us to avoid a transhistorical reading. It is about recognizing that certain ways of narrating life have been historically privileged, and that both Kropotkin and Margulis pointed out, from different contexts, the blind spots of that privilege.
The relation between them is not that of an origin and its confirmation, nor of an early intuition validated by later science. It is that of two interventions that, without knowing or needing each other, produce similar effects: they destabilize the certainty of a narrative that presented itself as natural, inevitable, and exhaustive. In that destabilization—and not in a doctrinal identity—lies their deepest link.
Science, Power, and the Problem of the Single Narrative
The problem running through these discussions is not science as practice, but the way in which certain scientific narratives attain the status of a single explanation. When a theory ceases to operate as a provisional tool and consolidates as a compulsory grammar, its link to power becomes less visible but more effective. Science is not neutral: its categories, its objects, and its methods are produced within historical matrices of power. In that framework, any narrative that presents itself as natural and inevitable tends to reproduce itself without friction.
A single narrative does not need to impose itself explicitly. It suffices that it delimits the field of the sayable, establishes which questions are legitimate and which are irrelevant, which relations deserve attention and which can be dismissed as marginal. In that sense, the competitive explanation of life not only organized evolutionary biology for decades but also offered a language coherent with hierarchical ways of organizing the social world.
This coupling between science and social order did not operate as a conspiracy in the classical sense, but it cannot be read as a neutral or accidental process either. It was a historical convergence between scientific frameworks, academic institutions, and power structures that favored certain readings of life and systematically relegated others. Scientific theories do not circulate in isolation: they are inscribed in cultural, economic, and political contexts that condition their reception, teaching, and dissemination. When a scientific narrative coincides with the dominant structures of its time, its situated character tends to be erased and to present itself as pure evidence.
The problem appears when this naturalization closes off the possibility of other readings. Life, conceived exclusively as competition, leaves little room for understanding phenomena of interdependence, coexistence, or shared vulnerability. Not because such phenomena do not exist, but because they do not fit the narrative that has been invested with explanatory authority. The power of the single narrative lies not in its falsity, but in its capacity to exclude without needing to refute.
It is at this point that the interventions of Kropotkin and Margulis acquire their critical relevance. They do not limit themselves to pointing out fissures in a dominant narrative; they reorder the very foundations from which life had been thought, without turning this reordering into a new orthodoxy. Their power lies not in offering a total explanation, but in preventing a single explanation from ever again being erected as destiny.
Both force us to recognize that life cannot be captured by a single story, and that any narrative that aspires to do so runs the risk of impoverishing what it seeks to explain. Thinking about science from this perspective does not imply relativizing knowledge or renouncing its rigor. It implies, rather, recovering its historical dimension and accepting that its stories are always partial, situated, and revisable.
Fissures That Clear the Path
Neither Kropotkin nor Margulis offered a definitive solution. But to reduce the scope of their works to a mere invitation to question would be to minimize their gesture. Their interventions do not stop at opening questions: they clear ground that had been obstructed by a single narrative, and they make it unsustainable to continue speaking of life as if competition, hierarchy, and conquest were its inevitable grammar.
Kropotkin was not content to point out an omission. By discussing the reception of Darwinism, he dismantled a powerful alibi: the idea that hierarchical social order found its ultimate justification in nature. By showing that cooperation had been systematically ignored, he did not add a nuance to the dominant theory; he broke the equivalence between natural necessity and historical order. After Mutual Aid, competition can no longer be honestly presented as biological destiny without revealing its ideological burden.
Something analogous occurs with Margulis's work. Symbiogenesis is not just an alternative hypothesis within evolutionary biology: it is a direct blow to the narrative that identifies complexity with gradual accumulation and progress with individual optimization. By demonstrating that complex life arises from processes of integration and forced cohabitation, Margulis deactivates the image of evolution as a triumphal march of victors. Not because she denies conflict, but because she shows that it is insufficient to explain what exists.
In both cases, what is wounded is not an isolated theory, but a way of narrating life that had managed to present itself as neutral and exhaustive. Kropotkin and Margulis do not found a new universal law, but they make it impossible to continue holding the previous one with the same certainty. They introduce irreversible damage to the narrative that turned history—biological and social—into a naturalized succession of hierarchies.
That is why their works do not promise salvation, but neither do they dissolve into pure doubt. They clear the path in a precise sense: they remove the ground from under an explanation that legitimized the existing order as natural necessity. After them, life can no longer be honestly thought of as a solitary upward race without recognizing the density of the bonds, mutual dependencies, and alliances that sustain it.
Perhaps that is their deepest common power. They left an open wound in the heart of the modern narrative of life. A wound that cannot be closed by another doctrine, but that forces us to think without the comfort of a destiny written in advance.
