The Prince of Evolution: Peter Kropotkin's Adventures in Science and
Politics
In his new book, Lee Alan Dugatkin tells the tale of one of the world's
first modern international celebrities, whose writings shared the common
thread of a scientific law of mutual aid, which guided the evolution of all
life on Earth
By Lee Alan Dugatkin
Scientific American, Tuesday, September 13, 2011
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-prince-of-evolution-peter-kropotkin
The book jacket for The Prince of Evolution features Isaak Levitan's
"Hunters Trekking Through a Winter Landscape" (1876).
Editor's Note: The following is excerpted from The Prince of Evolution:
Peter Kropotkin's Adventures in Science and Politics by Lee Alan Dugatkin.
Copyright (c) 2011 by Lee Alan Dugatkin.
"...{He is} that beautiful white Christ which seems to be coming out of
Russia... {one} of the most perfect lives I have come across in my own
experience."
-Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde was not the sort of man prone to effusive compliments. Who
could possibly have merited such glowing praise from Wilde's typically
satirical, razor-edged pen? That perfect life, the White Christ, belonged
to a quite remarkable Russian scientist, explorer, historian, political
scientist, and former prince by the name of Peter Kropotkin.
Kropotkin was one of the world's first international celebrities. In
England he was known primarily as a brilliant scientist, but Kropotkin's
fame in continental Europe centered more on his role as a founder and vocal
proponent of anarchism. In the United States, he pursued both passions.
Tens of thousands of people followed "ex-Prince Peter"--and that is how he
was often billed--during two speaking tours in America.
Kropotkin's path to fame was unexpected and labyrinthine, with asides in
prison, breathtaking 50,000-mile journeys through the wastelands of Siberia,
and banishment, for one reason or another, from most respectable Western
countries of the day. In his homeland of Russia, Peter went from being Czar
Alexander II's favored teenage page, to a young man enamored with the theory
of evolution, to a convicted felon, jail-breaker and general agitator,
eventually being chased halfway around the world by the Russian Secret
police for his radical--some might (and did) say enlightened--political
views.
Both while in jail, and while on the run when he was entertaining and
enlightening huge crowds, Kropotkin found the energy and concentration to
write books on a dazzling array of topics: evolution and behavior, ethics,
the geography of Asia, anarchism, socialism and communism, penal systems,
the coming industrial revolution in the East, the French Revolution, and the
state of Russian literature. Though seemingly disparate topics, a common
thread--the scientific law of mutual aid, which guided the evolution of all
life on earth--tied these works together. This law boils down to
Kropotkin's deep-seated conviction that what we today would call altruism
and cooperation--but what the Prince called mutual aid--was the driving
evolutionary force behind all social life, be it in microbes, animals or
humans. Traveling around the world, and trying to elude the Secret Police,
simply gave Kropotkin the time, material and experience to develop his
ideas.
Peter's theory of mutual aid came to him in the most unlikely of places. To
follow in the footsteps of his hero, Alexander von Humboldt, when he was
twenty years old, Kropotkin began a series of expeditions in Siberia. At
that point, he was already an avowed evolutionary biologist--one of the few
in Russia--and a great admirer of Darwin and his theory of natural
selection. Fifty thousand miles later, and five years the wiser, Kropotkin
left Siberia a Darwinian. But he was a very different kind of evolutionary
biologist: a new species of sort. For in Siberia, Kropotkin had not found
what he had expected to find. Though still in its early gestation period
when Kropotkin began his journey through Siberia, evolutionary theory of the
day advanced that the natural world was a brutal place: competition was the
driving force. And so, in the icy wilderness, Peter expected to witness
nature red in tooth and claw. He searched for it. He studied flocks of
migrating birds and mammals, fish schools, and insect societies.
What he found was that competition was virtually nonexistent. Instead, in
every nook and cranny of the animal world, he encountered mutual aid.
Individuals huddled for warmth, fed one another, and guarded their groups
from danger, all seeming to be cogs in a larger cooperative society. "In
all the scenes of animal lives which passed before my eyes," Kropotkin
wrote, "I saw mutual aid and mutual support carried on to an extent which
made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the
maintenance of life, the preservation of each species and its further
evolution."
Kropotkin didn't limit his studies to animals alone. He cherished his time
in peasant villages, with their sense of community and cooperation: in
these small Siberian villages, Kropotkin began to understand "the inner
springs of the life of human society." There, by observing "the
constructive work of the unknown masses," the young scientist witnessed
human cooperation and altruism in its purest form.
The conflict then arose in trying to align his observations with Darwinian
theory. While he might easily have abandoned evolutionary thinking
altogether, joining many other Russian scientists in dismissing Darwin's
ideas as nothing more than Victorian smoke and mirrors, Kropotkin understood
that evolutionary thinking could explain the diversity of life he saw around
him. And so he set up the tightrope on which he would balance for the rest
of his life.
He advocated that natural selection was the driving force that shaped life,
but that Darwin's ideas had been perverted and misrepresented by British
scientists. Natural selection, Kropotkin argued, led to mutual aid, not
competition, among individuals. Natural selection favored societies in
which mutual aid thrived, and individuals in these societies had an innate
predisposition to mutual aid because natural selection had favored such
actions. Kropotkin even coined a new scientific term--progressive
evolution--to describe how mutual aid became the sine qua non of all
societal life--animal and human. Years later, with the help of others,
Kropotkin would formalize the idea that mutual aid was a biological law,
with many implications, but the seeds were first sown in Siberia.
From the Siberian tundra, Kropotkin's thinking turned to the political
implications of mutual aid. The ants and termites, the birds, the fish and
the mammals were cooperating in the absence of any formal organizational
structure--that is without any form of "government." The same was true in
the peasant villages, where mutual aid abounded, but a centralized
government structure was nowhere to be seen.
Kropotkin sensed great similarities with the writings of anarchists, which
he had taken to covertly as a teenager. Leave people with complete freedom
and autonomy, Peter had read in the anarchist literature, and they will
naturally cooperate. In Siberia, Kropotkin had discovered this to be true
not only for humans, but for all species that lived in groups. What marked
so much in the natural world could surely help in politics and society.
"I lost in Siberia," Kropotkin would write," whatever faith in State
discipline I had cherished before: I was prepared to become an anarchist."
Peter became so convinced that his scientific findings on mutual aid
explained the biological underpinnings of political anarchy, that years
after his trek through Siberia, he wrote in his obituary for Charles Darwin
that, properly understood, Darwin's theories were "an excellent argument
that animal societies are best organized in the communist-anarchist manner."
In time, Kropotkin's ideas on the science of mutual aid would lead to his
rise as the most famous anarchist of his day. Kropotkin today retains his
moniker as a key founder of anarchist principles. And for more than 80
years--until about the 1960s--Kropotkin's ideas on mutual aid played a
prominent, critical role in the study of behavior and evolution. And during
that same period, the Prince's book-length treatments on ethics, geology,
history and literature had a huge impact not only on those fields, but on
areas as diverse as city planning, communist ideology and the modern "green"
movement.
In the late 1980s, while researching my own Ph.D. dissertation on animal
behavior and the evolution of cooperation, I came across many citations to
Peter Kropotkin's work on this same topic. Quickly I came to realize a few
things. Either these citations were "throwaways"--that is, citations to
books the authors themselves had never read--or they were about Kropotkin
the anarchist, not Kropotkin the scientist. But, when I read Kropotkin's
books, cover to cover--which I did many times, in part because they are so
wonderfully written--I realized that his ideas were so much more important
than indicated in the evolution and animal behavior literature.
In addition to Kropotkin being one of the most famous political anarchists
in history, he was an extraordinarily important figure in terms of his
science. He was the first person to propose that animal cooperation was
crucial for understanding the evolutionary process. He challenged the
prevailing Darwinian principle that evolution was strictly about survival of
the strongest. It would have been remarkable enough if Kropotkin had done
this in obscurity, but quite the contrary--in his day he was the public face
of these ideas, and one of the most recognizable people on the planet,
lecturing on an astonishing array of subjects all over the world.
There is currently an entire subdiscipline in biology devoted to the study
of cooperation and altruism in animals. This is not a small enterprise.
E.O. Wilson called understanding animal cooperation and altruism one of the
fundamental problems in the study of animal behavior, and that emphasis can
be seen in the laboratories of scores of researchers who specialize in this
area today--laboratories from UCLA to Princeton, from the University of
Texas to the University of Helsinki. Kropotkin's work in the late 1800s
marks the birthplace of this field.
Many of the ideas that are the focus of research in modern labs working on
animal cooperation are based on permutations of ideas first raised to the
surface by Peter Kropotkin. Literally hundreds of papers come out each year
on animal cooperation--many in preeminent journals such as Nature and
Science--and so many of these papers show Kropotkin to be a prophet. And
Kropotkin was not only the first person who clearly demonstrated that
cooperation was important among animals, he was the first person to
forcefully argue that understanding cooperation in animals would shed light
on human cooperation, and, indeed would permit science to help promote human
cooperation, perhaps saving our species from destroying itself. Today,
anthropologists, political scientists, economists and psychologists publish
hundreds of studies each year on human cooperation, and researchers in these
fields are just beginning to realize that so many of the topics they are
investigating were first suggested and promulgated by Peter Kropotkin.
