Historian Thomas Martin writes, in this issue of Social Anarchism (a paper called Anarchism and the Question of Human Nature):

"Many philosophers and scientists on the Left have condemned, sometimes on absurd and embarrassing grounds, the findings of cognitive science and evolutionary biology."

Written in an ultra-left review, even one with limited audience, this avowal means the world to all of those scientists and philosophers who have been fighting anti-naturalist prejudices. The anarchists I know of (I mean the official ones with a black flag, an affiliation and all) are going mad every time the word "evolution" gets mentioned. The French ultra-left, with a few exceptions, has adopted a very narrow view of the study of human nature. To put it shortly, each time a naturalistic point of view is expressed, they search for the use a fascist regime could make of it (for them the French government qualifies as fascist). They find one, however far-fetched, then condemn the whole point of view and leave it at that. Such preposterous slogans as "Ni Dieu ni Gène", or "Ni Dieu, ni Darwin" (a deformation of Proudhon's famous "Ni Dieu, Ni Maître", meaning No God, No Master) have been put forward even in the most respectable academic circles (see here, and here, and here).

But the times they are a-changing, as such a book as "A Darwinian Left", by Peter Singer, lets us hope. Meanwhile, an unnnoticed brand of anarchist darwinism has always existed; Martin reminds us of Piotr Kropotkin

"To make a connection between ecology, evolution and anarchism was a stroke of genius, to say the least — in my opinion it makes Kropotkin one of the greatest thinkers of the past thousand years, right up there with Aquinas, Calvin, Marx and Einstein. As all anarchists (but not many others) know, Kropotkin accepted Darwin’s basic findings but disputed the Darwinist contention that competition rather than cooperation is the central mechanism of evolution. His Mutual Aid framed the idea, and it has been developed much further in the century since, with supporting input from general systems theory, the science of ecology, and other disciplines that Kropotkin himself did not live to see."

One might add that some figures of evolutionary psychology or sociobiology, people like Bob Trivers or Dan Sperber, have anarchic sympathies. Trivers is explicit about the influence of Kropotkin on his theory of reciprocal altruism. Thomas Martin does justice to this often disregarded intellectual trend. However, you cannot expect him to buy the whole naturalistic formula. For example, he refuses to admit that morality might have innate basis (a point that we argued at length here and there). His heart is obviously more on the side of a holistic approach to evolution than on that of Dawkinsian selfish genes. Sometimes his view of science is completely inaccurate, for example when he writes:

"The philosophical roots of cognitive science are not very long: they reach down through time only so far as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John Dewey. Merleau-Ponty was influenced primarily by Kojève and Husserl. Dewey, of course, is one of the best-known educators and philosophers in American life. His simple but profound epistemology, which challenges the traditional boundary between the inner and outer worlds of experience, is the philosophical basis of cognitive science."

It seems that Mr. Martin got his information from supporters of embodied cognition (in short: a brand of psychological thought that promises to do away with the notion of mental representation, and focuses on the way the body interacts with the world). But however cool embodied cognition can be, it cannot stand for the whole of cognitive science (indeed, it is but a trend among many others), and you cannot rebuild the history of the discipline in order to include only those thinkers that embodied cognitivists are dotting on. The truth is that Dewey and Merleau-Ponty did not have the slightest impact on cognitive science before the nineties (and even that is true only of Merleau; Dewey was never part of the picture).

Mr.Martin's commitment to modern theories of human nature is at times shallow and misinformed. But frankly, this change in tone on behalf of an anarchist review, is more than anyone could have hoped for ten years ago. The French ultra-left intelligentsia does not even come remotely close to this level of open-mindedness.

"But I hope that I have demonstrated the need for anarchists to take another look at the scientific evidence. We need not abandon Boas or Kroeber or the many other scientists and philosophers who have contributed to the anarchist stream of thought. But we do need to be critical when necessary, and we need to take cutting-edge science back from the right-wing ideologues who have commandeered it to their own uses. If there’s one good thing we have learned from modern science, going all the way back to Bacon and Galileo, it’s this: you can’t pick and choose your evidence to fit your preconceived opinion."