by ERIC MICHAEL JOHNSON and LEE ALAN DUGATKIN
Evolutionary biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin has made his career studying cooperation, so it makes perfect sense that the subject of his latest book would be an anarchist. In The Prince of Evolution Dugatkin tells the story of the Russian prince, evolutionary theorist, and political radical Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin whose Darwinian theory of mutual aid was the first to argue that cooperation was an integral part of natural selection. Today, the quest to understand how cooperative behavior evolved is one of the hottest areas in the life sciences, though few researchers realize that many of their questions were first posed by Kropotkin more than a century ago.
“Kropotkin was not only the first person who clearly demonstrated that cooperation was important among animals,” Dugatkin writes, “he was the first person to forcefully argue that understanding cooperation in animals would shed light on human cooperation.”
Dugatkin’s book [an excerpt of which has been posted at Scientific American.com] is a précis on Kropotkin’s life and work, an overview that highlights the common theme of mutual aid in both his scientific and political ideas. Some may be familiar with Kropotkin as the revolutionary theorist of anarchism, a political system in which people organize their own affairs at the local level without interference from an external government, but few are likely to realize that this “anarchist Prince” started out as a physical geographer and geologist whose work was celebrated around the world. The discoveries that Kropotkin made of glacial formations during the Quaternary Period in Russia were received with international acclaim and earned him invitations to join the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as a Cambridge University endowed chair in geology (which he turned down because it came with the stipulation that he give up his political work).
The Prince of Evolution offers a tantalizing peek into the life and ideas of a man Dugatkin calls “one of the world’s first international celebrities,” someone who filled auditoriums throughout Europe, England, and the United States with talks ranging from biology to anarchy to Russian literature. Kropotkin was a thinker whose ideas were so large that a single discipline could not contain them, and they were thought to be so dangerous that he was arrested multiple times and spent lengthy prison terms in Russia and France for communicating them. Part of what made him such a threat to the monarchs of Europe, Dugatkin suggests, was that Kropotkin refused to accept any authority that wasn’t based on scientific principles. He urged people everywhere to reject illegitimate tyranny and to use the tools of critical thinking and science to build a more equitable society themselves. As Kropotkin wrote in his Appeal to the Young (1880):
We need above everything to spread the truths already mastered by science, to make them part of our daily life, to render them common property. We have to order things so that all, so that the mass of mankind, may be capable of understanding and applying them; we have to make science no longer a luxury but the foundation of every man’s life. This is what justice demands. I go further: I say that the interests of science itself lie in the same direction. Science only makes real progress when a new truth finds a soil already prepared to receive it.
Lee Alan Dugatkin has likewise taken up this clarion call for science advocacy. As a Professor and Distinguished University Scholar in the Department of Biology at University of Louisville in Kentucky, he has published eight books and more than one hundred scientific papers in such journals as Nature, Quarterly Review of Biology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. He has also written for Scientific American [“How Females Choose Their Mates,” April, 1998; “Jefferson’s Moose and the Case against American Degeneracy,” Feb., 2011], as well as New Scientist, BioScience, The Huffington Post and The Wilson Quarterly.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Dugatkin last week to discuss his latest project on the science of Peter Kropotkin and what we might learn from a notorious anarchist whose ideas continue to inspire and provoke to this day.
Eric Michael Johnson: One of the things that strikes me about Kropotkin’s work is how he always saw the world through his scientific lens. He insisted that any important political philosophy needed to be based in scientific principles and he dismissed Karl Marx for that very reason. He even called Marxism a cult.
Lee Alan Dugatkin: Not only did Kropotkin think of Marxism as a cult but he also referred to Berlin as their Mecca. He has a number of wonderful quotes like that. Everything that he did from his work on biology and geology to his work on anarchy to his work on prisons or the French Revolution were all done through the prism of science. He made a point of arguing that one of the things that separated the anarchist philosophy from other political systems, including Marxism, is that anarchism was based on scientific principles, and specifically those principles derived from evolutionary thinking. Even though Marxism claimed to be a scientific discipline, it was not based on a biological understanding of the world at all.
One of the things that he despised about Marxism is that it was based on the idea of ultimate government control, whereas Kropotkin wanted no government shackles on anybody. He thought it was good that they wanted to distribute resources more fairly, but he didn’t think the government should have that role. He thought that the distribution should take place without government and that it should happen more naturally. Kropotkin wasn’t advocating a violent expropriation of resources, even though he was not particularly outspoken against violence, but he himself didn’t see violence as the way to get there.
Johnson: Kropotkin was also highly critical of the excesses of capitalism. However, as you point out in your book, he used the work of the economist Adam Smith to argue against the very competition that most people assume Smith was advocating. Why would an anarchist turn to the father of modern capitalism to make his case?
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