Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin | Biography

Known mainly in politics as a revolutionist, in philosophy as an anarchist, and in science as a geographer and geologist, Kropotkin nevertheless made important theoretical contributions to genetics, primarily through his attacks on Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), social Darwinism, and the idea of the survival of the fittest. Kropotkin's attacks inspired a cogent defense of evolutionary theory that resulted in widespread acceptance of the theory by the dawn of the twentieth century. In 1902 Kropotkin published Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, in which he argued, using social insects among his examples, that natural environmental conditions promote cooperation among individuals and symbiosis between species. Although many scientists also argue that an instinct to cooperate underlies social behavior in some species, Kropotkin's arguments reflecting his fundamental belief that evolution favors the health and survival of the species over the welfare and fitness of individuals and their progeny has been discredited by modern understandings of genetic mechanisms.

Born in Moscow, heir to the Grand Princes of Smolensk and son of a career military officer, Kropotkin was tutored at home in the Russian aristocratic tradition. His tutors included a medical student, Nikolai Mikhailovich Pavlov (fl. 1860). In 1857, he entered the Corps of Pages, the elite military school in St. Petersburg, having been personally selected by Tsar Nicholas I (1796-1855) in 1850 for this honor. Upon graduating at the top of his class in 1861, he became page de chamber (a personal assistant) to Tsar Alexander II (1818-1881). The excesses of the tsarist regime, which he observed close at hand, increasingly disgusted his gentle nature and profound sense of noblesse oblige and finally led him to request transfer in 1862 to Siberia, where he distinguished himself as a geologist, geographer, naturalist, and cartographer. Returning to St. Petersburg in 1867, he lived with his brother Aleksandr Alekseevich (1846-1886) and continued geographic work. Because his revolutionary zeal was more powerful than his desire for renown, he refused the prestigious Secretariat of the Russian Geographical Society in 1871. The following year he met many famous anarchists at the meeting of the Jura Federation in Switzerland. Back in Russia, as a new member of the anarchist circle of Nikolai Vasilevich Chaikovskii (1850-1926), he was arrested and imprisoned in 1874, but escaped in 1876, lived in Europe, America, and England, and returned to Russia in 1917. The Bolsheviks tolerated him because of his worldwide fame as a revolutionary anarchist communist, despite his anti-statism.

Kropotkin has sometimes been accused of manipulating scientific data into an evolutionary theory that would support his political views, but in fact the opposite is true. Kropotkin became an anarchist in 1872. His general idea of mutual aid had already taken shape by then, even though it was not published until much later. He spent thirty years gathering an abundance of empirical examples for Mutual Aid. In 1880 he read a paper by zoologist Karl Fedorovich Kessler (1815-1881) that slightly modified his arguments about evolution and symbiosis, but always, for Kropotkin, cooperation, both within species, as with ants, wolves, or baboons, and between species, as with clown fish and anemone, oxpecker and rhinoceros, or bee and flowering plant, was a more fundamental evolutionary factor than competition.