The Prince of Evolution

Many years ago, I traveled across Europe in a peculiar caravan of scientists, artists and a large number of in-betweens. I had two jobs to do: firstly, I was supposed to collect the insights of the caravan members, as we moved from village to village in this tour of rural Europe. Secondly, I had to finish a report on a four-month research I did to obtain my BSc in chemistry.

The experiment I had been supposed to do was fairly straightforward. Some mysterious protein in cyanobacteria was expressed under stressful conditions (e.g. intense light), and I needed to measure how this protein changes things like growth rate, photo-toxicity, etc. Without wanting to go into much details (this is a review after all, not my autobiography), I started thinking about the relations between individual bacteria. In high school, [a:Richard Dawkins|1194|Richard Dawkins|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1188068989p2/1194.jpg]' [b:The Selfish Gene|315240|Selfish Gene|Richard Dawkins|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1298502214s/315240.jpg|1746717] had convinced me to adopt a gene-centered view on evolution and I wondered: could some of the cyanobacteria be absorbing dangerous radiation to let their genetically almost identical counterparts flourish?

I set up some off-the-record experiments to test this, but had trouble making good sense of the results. I had to lean on some convincing assumptions regarding self-organization and so, when the caravan was on the road and I wasn't writing stuff about European villages, I worked through [a:Scott Camazine|343977|Scott Camazine|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg]'s [b:Self-Organization in Biological Systems|925585|Self-Organization in Biological Systems |Scott Camazine|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179509673s/925585.jpg|910593], hoping for inspiration that I could put to use, together with [b:Brock's Biology of Microorganisms|929081|Brock's Biology of Microorganisms (10th Edition)|Michael T. Madigan|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179538945s/929081.jpg|914073].

The reason I am sharing this, is because it sets the stage for my introduction to [a:Peter Kropotkin|34296|Peter Kropotkin|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1195877110p2/34296.jpg] and will explain why I enjoyed [a:Lee Dugatkin|697080|Lee Dugatkin|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg]'s account of the anarchistic prince so much. One night, having set camp up somewhere in the Baltic region, the caravan was suddenly overcome with heavy rain. Unfortunately for me, I kept my copy of Brock's Biology in a camper that was not exactly waterproof and found the book soaking wet the next day.

This was a disaster, because it was the only way for me to find all the mechanisms and species that I needed to draw on to make my report look somewhat good. The guardian of my books, a fundamentalist cynic with a heavy negativity bias, started mocking me about caring about something (the caravan sported an interesting cast of characters), but I insisted that it was important for me to finish this work. Seeing as this is the fifth paragraph already, without a review in sight, I won't explain why the work was so important, but will simply say that the book guardian continued her mockery and pulled out something from her own stash of books. She told me it was also a biology book and implied that I should shut up already.

The book was a 19th-century treatise on Siberian ecology, and while it didn't help me write the report that was long overdue at the time, it was exactly what I was looking for. My love for cellular chemistry has started with me being astonished at its complexity and resilience, without central planning. My interest in self-organization - or construction without blueprint, as I believe Camazine put it - carried similar political dimensions. And here was a Russian prince, named Peter Kropotkin, making observations that were at times poor from the perspective of modern biology, but essentially stating the same thing. This, and the conflict that I saw between villages and the State during my travels, consolidated the ideals of anarchism in me, and shifted my interest in self-organization towards the emergence of group behavior.

Yet, this entry is not about me nor my about my thoughts on the evolution of mutualism. It's about The Prince of Evolution, a brief account of the life of Peter Kropotkin. In the book, Dugatkin easily shifts between the political and biological ideas of Kropotkin, and shows how both of them followed from this passion for naturalism. Stated matter-of-factly, the biography allows readers see how an aristocrat became receptive to radical politics and became convinced his utopia was possible because he witnessed it in the animal kingdom. Never does Dugatkin take a stance on Kropotkin's ideas, and so we read about the Russian biologist's embrace of Lamarckism without judgment or even a contemporary caveat.

This detachment works well. The Prince of Evolution is about ideas, but it's not about the validity of these ideas. It's about how they can move from one domain to another, about how seemingly academic ideas about the mutual dependence of ducks can lead to very real, grim events, such as Kropotkin's imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Maybe, it's also about how political dimensions can attenuate the spread of scientific ideas. When I first read Kropotkin, I could not help but think about whether his philosophy gave us the first faint shimmers of the Cold War, during which Kropotkin's homeland adapted the creed of communism, while the Anglo-Saxon world embraced the thought frame of Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest". Indeed, modern biology only started taking mutual aid and altruism seriously once the likes of [a:E.O. Wilson|31624|E.O. Wilson|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1227367019p2/31624.jpg] managed to describe a sociobiology that fit with capitalism and even conservative thought.

I am not sure whether Dugatkin would agree, but I think Kropotkin's relative obscurity in the western world is one of the reasons why, time and again, people point to the role of Darwinism in the precipitation of ideologies like national-socialism. It is not that nobody was opposing simplifications like "survival of the fittest", it is just that historic forces decided to keep these voices out of the limelight. Dugatkin's book may contribute to correcting that mistake, making The Prince of Evolution a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the history of thought, even if they're not anarchists.