The Prince of Evolution: Peter Kropotkin's Adventures in Science and Politics

Features | Evolution

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 ?| September 12, 2011

The book jacket for The Prince of Evolution features Isaak Levitan's "Hunters Trekking Through a Winter Landscape" (1876). Image: CreateSpace

Editor's Note: The following 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.

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