Part Two: Mutual Aid and Evolution: Peter Kropotkin and the Battle for Science

Margaret continues talking to Katie Goldin about the anarchist prince who laid the foundations for understanding cooperation in the wild.

Sources:

https://thebiologist.rsb.org.uk/biologist-features/who-was-peter-kropothkin

https://trise.org/2018/01/04/kropotkin-and-climate-change/

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/allan-antliff-memorializing-kropotkin

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch07c.htm

https://evolution.berkeley.edu/the-history-of-evolutionary-thought/1800s/uniformitarianism-charles-lyell/

https://summitborn.com/discovery-of-the-ice-age/

https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2024/11/18/gradualism-10/

https://strangescience.net/lyell.htm

https://medium.com/science-spectrum/how-darwin-discovered-invented-evolution-4d99aadf5656

https://psyche.co/ideas/kropotkin-the-radical-aristocrat-who-put-kindness-on-a-scientific-footing

https://www.marxists.org/subject/science/essays/kropotkin.htm

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to cool people who
did cool stuff like studying glaciers. I am your host,
Marta Kiljoy, and with me today is Katie Golden, host
of the podcast How Glaciers Move.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
That's oh close enough.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Creature Feature, Ah, the science of organic things instead of
inorganic things.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Yes, I mean I talk about glaciers sometimes every so often.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Okay, see, and that's what I was saying. That's why
I definitely knew that people should check out Creature Feature.
And I think we, as you pointed out, if you
like stories about animals and science like this episode, you'll
probably like it. How are you doing today?

Speaker 2 (00:44):
I'm doing great. I'm excited to talk about this topic
because we get to talk about a prince of evolution.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
Yeah, totally. I ended up like kind of emotional researching
this more than I expected, and not in the parts
where I expect. I'm actually barely going to talk about
the time he breaks out of prison, even though that's
like normally what I would talk about. But just actually
the stuff about mutual aid it got me. It got
me real much.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
Are you emotional about mutual aid? That's so crazy?

Speaker 1 (01:14):
I know, I know, no one would have ever expected that.
We also have a producer who's Sophie Hi. Sophie Hi,
So this is not the Kropotkin episode, because one day
I'm gonna just be so overwhelmed by the world that
I'm just going to do like an eight parter about
this man. Sorry everyone in advance or something to look

(01:36):
forward to in advance, depending on your opinions of anarchy. Santa,
much like how Darwin is, like these dudes, if they
live long enough, people only remember these old photos of him.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
Right, they all end up looking like Santa, either seremone
or Santa.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yeah, totally. Yeah. I heard an anecdote that might not
be true that he wants dressed up as Santa because
you're sick of everyone calling him Santa. But I don't
know if that's true. Anyway, This is part two. In
Part one, we laid out all of this kind of
context and precursor about geology and evolution and the kind

(02:15):
of scene that Peter Kropotkin is coming on too. Peter
Alexeyevich Kropotkin was born in eighteen forty two in Moscow
into the aristocracy. He is literally a prince. His father
was a prince. His family owned twelve hundred serfs, which
is a lot of people to own.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
See, I've never owned his serfs, so I don't really
know what's like a high or a low number of
serfs to own.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
You know. I actually didn't do a comparison to like
how many serfs the average prince in this artum was calling.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
Like are those middling numbers for serfs? Is that? You know?

Speaker 1 (02:55):
I think it's high. He's not like when you hear
prince and you only read fantasy books, you're like, this
guy is the next zar, right, But he's not. It's
because the zar is kind of like even higher than
like someone under him would be, So you can still
be a prince if you're like aristocracy lower. I sometimes

(03:16):
refuse to learn all this. I read a lot of fantasy,
and I write fantasy, but I get really frustrated thinking
that I should care about the difference between a baron
an account and a viscount and a blah blah blah
blah blah, because I hate all of them. So I
couldn't tell you. I think it's a lot of.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
People, Okay, I mean it sounds like a lot to me.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
He's going to end up a page like he's going
to personally attend to the czar at some point in
his life. Cool, Yeah, I mean sort of. Yeah, it's interesting.
I think that's how we'd probably think of it. Right,
We've covered Russian serfdom before on the show, but it's
been a while. Basically, serfs are enslaved, but not in
an American chattel slavery way. They are owned by the property,

(03:59):
like the land. I own this estate and it has
serfs who live there, and they can't leave and they
have to work for me.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
Right, it's kind of like indentured.

Speaker 1 (04:07):
Servitude, Yeah, but like seen as like part of the
property instead.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
Yeah, like you're on a deed.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
Yeah, and you're stuck that way your whole life, and
your kids are that way your whole life. But you're
still not as the American chattel slavery system was a
uniquely brutal form of being unfree. Yeah, this one wasn't
good either. Russia has always been sort of backwards by
European standards in terms of technological development and social development

(04:37):
and stuff, and everywhere else had freed the serfs a
long as time before, and not the United States that
had chattel slavery at this time. But you know, young
Peter Kopakin is not really a fan of his people
owning people. But it's going to be a while before
he's truly a radical woke. He's going to suffer for
being woke at various points.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
Woke Prince.

Speaker 1 (04:58):
Yeah, I'm mostly going to be talking about him as
a scientist and not as him as a person or
political figure. So I'm going to fast forward more than
I would normally. He goes to a military academy in
Saint Petersburg. He's a page for the fucking Czar. He
was very high up in various military and state positions,

(05:18):
but he mostly just wanted to do science, which was,
you know, a thing that rich aristocratic people could do.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
Right.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
So when the Czar managed to annex a bunch of
territory in Siberia and I think into Manchuria, Krpakin was like, oh, yeah,
I'll totally go take a military commission over there. Absolutely.
It's not so that I can just go study glaciers
and dried up lakes in Asia. I don't know what
you're talking about. Totally going to do military stuff for you.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
Man, it is a good country to be in if
you like glaciers.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yeah, totally. Well, nowhere is anymore, but now Rusha's a
good place to be if you like exploding methane pockets.
Have you read about this?

Speaker 2 (05:58):
Ah? No, I haven't.

Speaker 1 (05:59):
I was reading about this, like, there was a New
York Times article about it a couple of days ago
as I as we record this, that was like the
methane pockets that are being exposed by the warming permafrost.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
Right, like, yeah, you have all that organic material in there, Yeah,
and then it usually should just slowly decay, not necessarily explode.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
Well, so they're blowing up and like leaving like huge craters.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
Fun.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
Yeah, it's good. We live in the best possible world.
I can't imagine how anything could be better.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
No, no exploding earth farts.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yeah. He's mostly in a geography right, and he wants to
go explore geography in Siberia. But also, this new book
has just dropped on the origin of the species, and
he wants to go test that hypothesis a bunch, and
not in an antagonistic way. He is a young he's
in his twenties. He's like, fuck, yeah, I'm gonna go

(06:55):
find more evidence in a different place rather than the tropics.
I'm going to say, I'm going to find all the
animals competing. This is going to be great. I've read
this presented him going to Siberia as a voluntary exile
because it was so far away from the Imperial core.
He joined a eunuch of Cossacks, who are the nomadic

(07:16):
horseback people who largely served as shock troops and cavalry
for the czar at this point, and he headed off
to Siberia and then for five years in his twenties
he just like wandered around with a couple of guys
and did science and ostensibly also like government stuff in Siberia.

(07:36):
In Siberia and down into Manchuria, he wandered thirty thousand
miles on foot and horseback over this time, which is like,
I mean, that's not a lot of miles to put
on a car in five years, but it's not a
low number of miles to put on a five years.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
No, I mean that's a lot of walking in horse trotting.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
And it's not unexplored paths, even like locals and stuff
will be like I guess there was like one guy
who knows how to go over there. We'll send him
with you, you know, the like articles about this are
like and they had a map drawn on bark with
a knife. And he keeps discovering shit, and I hate
the way that we talk about discovery by Westerners, but

(08:17):
he keeps adding to Western science new things to understand.
Because Kropact is seen as the guy who this one
just doesn't make sense to me. He's seen as the
guy who discovered the plateau as a geological feature.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
I mean, I'm pretty sure there were people who were like,
they looked at a plateau and they're like, they probably
didn't call it a plateau because they had a different language,
but you're they're like, yeah, that's a flat topped hill
right there.

Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yeah, and people like lived on them and they're all
over the world. But I think the idea here I
read a couple of different things trying to get the
sense of what the fuck this means is that plateaus
were seen as sort of aberrations. They're like, oh, there's
this place, since it's a flat mountain, right And Kropaken,
reporting back about geology, said that they're quote a basic

(09:08):
and independent type of the Earth's relief, and so he's
kind of distinguishing them geologically from mountains and other formations.
But it still is like one of those things where
I'm like, I have to get really into the science
before I'm like, oh, yeah, this man discovered plateaus that
doesn't make any sense to me.

Speaker 2 (09:27):
He observed them, yeah, and told people about them.

Speaker 1 (09:31):
Yeah, totally. He started studying the dried up lake beds
all over Asia and writes about the desiccation of Asia,
about you know, it was drying out, and he starts
thinking about glaciers an awful lot, and about this ice
age thing that people have been theorizing about. The journey
East wasn't purely for science, of course. He would do

(09:54):
shit like find passages across mountains and blaze the trail
that railroads soon for followed doing the grunt work of
colonization essentially, or the I guess he was saying the
spread of empire. And he ends up retiring from his
post out East for political reasons. Basically, he's like becoming

(10:15):
more and more aware of the thing that he's doing,
and he gets more and more involved in radical politics.
But he's still a scientist, So he signs up with
the Russian Geographical Society to go look at the glacial
lakes and shit in Scandinavia. There he made a discovery
that this is one when I'm like, oh, I understand

(10:37):
this is a discovery more clearly. One source will say
that is his most important contribution to science. I think
mutual aid is a bigger deal. But whatever. He's the
guy who was looking at glaciers and how they moved
and said, oh, they don't move like a solid. This
is a super viscous fluid. In terms of how glaciers
themselves move.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
What is like the difference between a solid and a
super viscous fluid.

Speaker 1 (11:00):
A little bit beyond me. But it's essentially, like I
was reading that, it like moves essentially like plastic y right,
Like ause glaciers do flow, right, like when you imagine
like a block of metal that's like a version of
a solid, where it would it moved, it would just
like the whole thing would move in one piece, you know,
right right, I am under the impression that glaciers flow. Yeah,

(11:22):
it's like basically, but I don't know beyond.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
That as far as I understand it, that's it really,
It's just a it is a very slow flowing yeah,
large thing.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
Yeah. I've never been on a glacier. I went to
Glacier National Park and I saw a glacier through binoculars.
But Glacier National Park spoiler well, spoiler for the future
in the future doesn't have any glaciers, and it currently
has so many fewer glaciers than it did when it
got named.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
I've never been on a glacier and I've never seen
a glacier. Like, I don't know. I have a bad feeling.
I'm my opportunity to do so.

Speaker 1 (12:02):
I know, climate grief is so real, Like sometimes I
get lost thinking about all the like species of fish
that we literally drove extinct before we even saw them.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
Yeah, if you want to get sad, there's one that's
that really sticks in my crowitch is the well. It's
the one that hurts me the most, both as like
someone who loves evolutionary biology and animals and has gurd
It's the loss of the gastric brooding frog. It's this
frog that is able to like swallow its own offspring.

(12:34):
They'd be safe inside of its stomach and basically like
it would brood the offspring and its stomach like actual
stomach where the gastric acids are. Whoa not a uterus. Yeah,
and then it would when the little froglets were ready,
they'd come right back out, all safe and sound, all good.
And this frog when extinct, and if we had it

(12:58):
and it was alive, there's so many we could like
discover from it. First of all, it's really cool that
it does this, but also the fact that it was
able to have the stomach acid not to kill its
offspring how that worked and we don't know, And if
we were able to study them, I don't know, maybe
they'd be like, there's not really a cure for gurd

(13:21):
and the treatments all have downsides to them. So it's
like there's a really specific, tangible way in which like
climate change and extinctions have have messed up my life personally,
which is what is most important. No.

Speaker 1 (13:35):
Absolutely, Oh, what a cute frog.

Speaker 2 (13:38):
That makes me so sad, horible, it's very sad. Sorry,
I don't mean to.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
Well, you know what would be a good palette cleanser.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
Ads? Wow?

Speaker 1 (13:50):
Yeah, I'm a pro, here's the ads.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
Er back.

Speaker 1 (13:56):
It didn't work. I'm still sad about climate change. I
would have thought that that would have worked. I've been
told my whole life, this is the way to solve sadness. Yeah,
in order for the ads to survive, they actually need
to confront climate shy.

Speaker 2 (14:09):
Maybe if you buy one more thing then you'll be happy.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
Oh that's a good idea, it is. Yeah. So Peter Kerpakin,
he's in Scandinavia, Finland and Sweden. I don't know why
not Norway, but the thing I read said Finland and Sweden.
But now that I think about it, I can never
keep track of when Russia owned which parts of Scandinavia.
I don't know whatever. So he's up there, he's looking

(14:37):
at glaciers, he's looking at glacial lakes, and he ends
up providing all sorts of evidence about the ice age,
and he predicted that glaciers went down much further south
and specifically therefore that desiccation has been happening for thousands
of years across Eurasia. And he was I believe the

(14:59):
one who suggest that it was desiccation was causing the
lower rainfall, not the other way around. Through climatological things
that are slightly too complex for me. I read them
twice and then decided not to write them into my
script because I wouldn't be able explain them properly.

Speaker 2 (15:12):
I do that a lot.

Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yeah, yeah, totally. You're like, ah, yes, this one I
can understand and explain, and this one I would just
be able to quote. And there's a bunch of important
stuff in what he's saying here. He's saying that the
ice Age happened while humans were still around, and that
the receding glaciers impacted human society because the impacted are climate,
and that natural climate change was still impacting human society.

(15:37):
And so was maybe the first person to write about this,
to write about how climate change is affecting us and
how we need to fight it, even though he's talking
about natural climate change. And he's like, well, we must
stop nature cause climate change, and he wrote, quote, now,
we are fully in the period of a rapid desiccation

(15:58):
accompanied by the formation of dry prairies and steps, and
man has to find out the means to put a
check on the desiccation to which Central Asia has fallen
a victim and which menaces southeastern Europe. And he was like, look,
we all got to come together across national borders and
shit and plant a million trees and stop desertification.

Speaker 2 (16:16):
And everybody listened to him, and yes, why that's why
we're cool now.

Speaker 1 (16:22):
God, if people had listen to him about it, even
like a tenth of the shit he said, the world
will be ah, oh well yeah, so it goes. And
his theory was just a theory, right, he had evidence,
but he was backing up. He was presenting theories. He
was wrong about a lot of it. He had this
whole theory that he was wrong about about the desication

(16:43):
of Central Asia because he would go and he would
see these like dried up lake beds and like abandoned
cities and shit, right and be like, oh, climate change
killed the city. And he also presented a theory that
the Mongol invasions of Europe were the results of the
desertification of Asia and the pressures of climate change. And
this is incorrect, I believe. I tried to look it

(17:06):
up a lot and did not find supportive for this.
He also, you know, he wrote about these abandoned cities,
but the city of Petra is an example, and it
fell apart because trade routes changed, and then in the
year three point thirty three and earthquake fucked up all
its water infrastructure. So you know, nineteenth century scientists get
things wrong, unlike twenty first century.

Speaker 2 (17:28):
You win some, you lose some. Sometimes you declare entire
races of people not human. Yeah, but it doesn't sound
like this guy's going down that route.

Speaker 1 (17:39):
No, Actually, he very specifically doesn't. And there's a whole
other piece that I want to do eventually about radical anthropology,
because anthropology from the start as a Western science has
either been wildly racist or an attempt to be anti
colonial and anti racist. And a guy who fought in
the Paris commune named Alee Raclue, who I covered an
episode about Paris Commune years ago, was mostly famous as

(18:02):
a geographer, and he wrote about indigenous peoples of areas
I believe the first time I, like white Western European
was like, hey, they're like people, right, Like they actually
just are people, right, right? And Kropakin is from that
lineage of it, and the way he writes about he

(18:23):
calls them savages and barbarians and medieval cities when he
talks about mutual aid in his books that he writes
decades later, like some of the ways that they are
written about would not necessarily be the language we'd use today, right,
But specifically he is writing an anti racist piece.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
Right about it? Right, He's using the common word that
was used at the time. But he's not not what
you would think, it would imply necessarily.

Speaker 1 (18:48):
Yeah, he's trying to be like, look, they're people. It's
a different stage of things, you know, is my best
understanding of it. I'll one day do a deep dive
into that particular topic. But but yeah, he's right about
a lot of this stuff. And actually he's kind of
funny because the first ice Age guy said, oh, it
happened fifty thousand years ago, long before people, whereas Kerpawkin

(19:10):
is like, no, no, no, what happened when there's people?
It happened fourteen thousand years ago. And then I looked
it up, the peak of the last ice Age was
more like thirty thousand years ago. So they were both.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Wrong but right, just people were around, yeah exactly, yeah
years ago.

Speaker 1 (19:26):
Yeah, they've been around for a real long time by
yeah that point. So Kropacket's like more right in terms
of what it means, which is that there's people around,
But they were both off on their numbers. I mean,
we're still kind of guessing about a lot of those
numbers too well.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
I mean one of the issues is that, like I mean,
until you really had like carbon dating like evidence of
human sort of like tools and things are not necessarily
going to go all the way back to you know,
the origin of humans, because we weren't making those for
a while. There's a good while where we were sort
of like not advancing really quickly techno logically. Yeah, and

(20:01):
then suddenly kind of advanced quite quickly, and then you
had all this archaeological evidence, but maybe not as much
before then. And there's other reasons for that too, like
that you don't have a record of like everything going
throughout all of human history.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
No, that makes sense, and it's even wild to see
how much like as I'm trying to learn more about
anthropology that studies early humans and things like that, you're like, oh,
if a place didn't write things down, it like practically
doesn't exist, you know. Yeah, and like most places weren't
writing things down.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
Yeah, we've discovered like more mod like techniques of like
being able to take things. And now if you have
like a human skull, you could potentially look at like
stuff in the teeth to be able to determine diet
things like that, right, but we probably around cop Potkin's time,
you couldn't.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
Really do that yeah, totally. There's gonna be some stuff
where like he's like, I think future scientists are going
to be able to do the following, and then they could,
and it was cool but nice. He writes all this
stuff about climate change, he studies all this shit about glaciers,
and he goes back to Russia. He's actually been going
back to Russia fairly often. Wasn't like he just was
gone for years in this case. But he goes back
and he has a problem because in eighteen seventy one,

(21:15):
the people of Paris had thrown themselves a revolution. The
Paris Commune is one of the first things I ever
covered on the show because it is the sort of
foundational thing for most Western leftism, and the people of
Paris took over their own city. Did I say nineteen
seventy one? SOFI just highlighted the noight, I just oh,
I just assume I got it wrong. I always say

(21:36):
nineteen seventy one instead of eighteen seventy one, or vice versa.
Sometimes I talk about modern events and think they're in
the past because I live in the past. No, it's
just my script. I touched my mouth and it went
back to the beginning. Cool so the people of Paris
are like, we're fucking done with all this being ruled shit.
And also the people who ruled us did a really

(21:57):
bad job during the last war, and you're under siege
and we're all unhappy. They take over the city, they
declare for socialism. They get real confused about which version
of it they want to be because there's a lot
of different I don't know, if you've ever met leftists,
there's a lot of disagreement about exactly how it should happen.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
No, they all agree on one thing and don't do
that really effectively.

Speaker 1 (22:19):
Yeah, totally. And they set up a city council and
the militia and they transform society and suspend rent and
then they're all put down in a bloody soldiers versus
citizens war, And we don't know whether that they would
have worked out their interpersonal squabbles or not.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
They inspired people from all over the world, especially all
over Europe, mostly working class people, especially labor unions in Switzerland. Kripakin,
he's visiting Switzerland and he falls in with an anarchist
watchmakers union and he is like, oh, y'all rule, like
you all treat each other as equals. This is cool
as hell. I'm an anarchist.

Speaker 2 (22:55):
Now, did he start marking watches? Though?

Speaker 1 (22:58):
I know, I know that's the thing. He didn't big
up on that. Although there is this movie I haven't seen.
There's apparently this movie that came out recently that's about
his time hanging out with watchmakers. Yeah, but I don't
think he wanted to do that kind of work. He
wanted to do the thinking kind of work, not the
yeah small gears.

Speaker 2 (23:16):
Yeah, well it's you know, bad for the rest Anyways.
It's just like I feel like this is actually around
the time my great because like my family is from Odessa,
which used to be part of Russia, and they had
to get out of there for a couple reasons. One
my great grandfather was he was like a trade unionist

(23:38):
and also Jewish.

Speaker 1 (23:40):
So yeah, those are two things that are hard to
be at that time in Russia.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
Yeah, it was very hard to do. So, yeah, he
might have been hanging out with anarchist watchmakers. I don't
really know. My grandma told me so much stuff, like
she claimed he like met Lennon once. I'm like, I
don't think he probably told you that, But I don't
think he did.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
Yeah, maybe you know before Lenin was a big deal.
Who fucking knows, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
That's like the story. It's like, yeah, this was like before,
and I was like, yeah, I'm sure he said that,
but yeah, you know.

Speaker 1 (24:16):
Yeah, and then that area had a huge anarchist stuff.
We talked about the bial Stock Jewish anarchists at some point,
probably when we were talking about Ukraine during the Russian Revolution.
Sokpakin he hangs out with the watchmakers. He's like, I'm
an anarchist now, and he becomes the primary theorist of
anarchist communism. And to be blunting up front about my biases,

(24:37):
that's Kripakin laid the foundation for what I believe politically,
I'm an anarchist. Communist is the closest label to what
I believe. And it's cool and fun to be a revolutionary.
But then when you're one of the tsar's top men, right,
you're like this prince right, and you don't exactly live
in a free speech area in Tsarist Russia. Not really, It

(25:00):
is really dangerous to be as radical as Kripakin is getting.
He joins a group called the Circle of Daikovsky, which
is actually a less radical group of nihilists. These are
not the like, let's blow up thozar nihilists. These are
the let's print band books and talk to workers right
group people. But that doesn't save you, right, No. And

(25:25):
so he spends like half of his time abroad and
in half of his time in Russia living in disguise,
and he disguises himself as a peasant organizer named Borodin.
And I love that his disguise is one a little
bit of like poverty LARPing, right, m he's slumming it, Yeah,
he's slumming it. But also he's like still doing something

(25:45):
that's wildly illegal and dangerous. Yeah, he's just not doing
it as Prince Peter Kikpakin. And I wonder whether it's
to hide from the fucking cops or whether it's he
doesn't want his friends to know.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
Well, I mean probably a little both, right, But like
I guess you're you're probably a bigger target if you're
a prince, right, because you don't want to make the
nobility feel like they can go and join, yeah, totally,
the revolutionaries, because that would be really big. You don't
want to like a cross class solidarity like that. That'd
be fucking bad for Bizar, So then you know. But
then on the other hand, man, but I'm looking at

(26:19):
like this photo of him in eighteen seventy six.

Speaker 1 (26:21):
Uh huh.

Speaker 2 (26:22):
He looks like one of those optical illusions where it's
like when you flip it's like either a guy with
a really big beard or a guy with a really
big hair, depending on or that you flip it up.
Oh yeah, yeah, huh. He could have just like taken
his beard and put it on his head and he'd
be like a whole new guy.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
Yeah, totally. Evelnd have that Russian hat. He is. This
man has a magnificent beard.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
Throughout his life, like not just the Santa stage like,
it looks like he cultivated it. Yeah, when he was
younger as well.

Speaker 1 (26:49):
Totally. And that photo that you're looking at I think
was taken by veteran of the pod Nadare, who was
the inventor of aerial photography and also air mail and
took a lot of the finals of radicals at the time.
So I wish there was a photo of him when

(27:09):
he was cosplaying as a poor person.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
Though yeah, I can't, I say young, I don't. He
looks pretty princely and these young fuddy Yeah, to be
honest with you, Yeah, he's got a nutcracker outfit on,
so I don't think that one's it.

Speaker 1 (27:28):
Yeah, he grew up to be the nutcracker basically, and
so he's doing all this crazy illegal shit. But he
wants to talk to the Geographical Society of Russia in
March eighteen seventy four. He's like, but I have to
give a talk. I have to go be part of
the scientific establishment, right, But all of his friends have

(27:51):
just been arrested. The crackdown is coming for his scene,
and he like thinks through his options and he's like,
all right, I could flee the country, or hear me out,
I could go give my science talk, right.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah. It's really tough to make that decision.

Speaker 1 (28:08):
So he decides to go give a science talk.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
He already did his slides. I know exactly, he wrote
all his slides.

Speaker 1 (28:15):
He's like, ah, yeah, what's a couple of years in prison.
And so he goes and he gives us talk about
the ice age and climate change and all of this stuff,
and then they come and arrest him. Yeah, and he
apparently like a friend of mine who studies grip hawking
much more closely than I do. I was talking about

(28:37):
how it's doing this episode, and my friend was like,
and then he gets home and he's burning all of
his papers because he's like, I gotta you know. He's like,
he knows he's about to go down, so he's like
burning all of his records and this is our secret police.
The third section arrest him and throw him into the
most notorious prison in the country, and he spends two

(28:58):
years in that prison. While he's in that prison, he
starts writing a two volume book. He's still kind of
I think this is where he still gets to kind
of be a prince a little bit. I mean, like
they have no intention of ever letting him see the
light of day again. But I think he's like allowed
to get his books and papers and stuff in and
like write, you know, And he starts writing was supposed

(29:18):
to be a two volume book. What the Trends National
Institute of Social Ecology says is, quote the first scientific
attempt to make a comprehensive case for natural climate change
as a prime mover in the history of civilization. And
so he's doing his geography and how it affects the
political world. The first volume of it his brother helps

(29:40):
him publish. The second volume gets confiscated. I think it
doesn't get published till nineteen ninety eight. Whoa, yeah, because
the Bolsheviks don't like this man either.

Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah. I've made a few attempts to completely understand all
of the politics of the Russian Revolution.

Speaker 1 (29:59):
Oh, it's rough.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
I think the sort of popular notion, certainly, my notion
of it before I made an attempt to understand it
is that it's like, you know, you just have like
you have the uprising against the czar, and like the
uprising is this sort of unified front of you know, yeah,
people revolutioning.

Speaker 1 (30:17):
Yeah, huh, and no, it's really no.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
And then later Stalin kind of like takes it too
far and starts turning around on people and stuff. But
like when you actually like you look into it, it's like, no,
you had a lot of really gentle natured people at
the beginning of the revolution, like a lot of feminists
and anarchists who are like like, hey, I have this
really lovely vision for our country. And then it's like

(30:44):
if you were like the early politics of it were
really really brutal. Yeah it's really nasty.

Speaker 1 (30:50):
Yeah, No, absolutely, it took me a very long time
to even get a basic sense of it. And and
I think part of it is that because we get told,
especially if we grew up in like Cold War the
United States, you just have like there's two political ideologies.
There's capitalism and communism, and capitalism is flawed and good,
and communism is idealistic and evil, you know, and like

(31:15):
it's just those are just unrelated to the actual truth.
Like and it it doesn't set you up to understand
what the SRS want versus the anarchists versus the Green Army,
versus the Bolsheviks versus the Mensheviks.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
Like it was so complicated, like the basic thing that
I cannot remember all the different factions and everything that
they were called. But my understanding of it is like
it went awry because the politically savvy people had more
of a killer instinct and ended up being a lot

(31:53):
more successful in a lot of ways. But that's like.

Speaker 1 (31:56):
Would say, the survival of the fittest, that's.

Speaker 2 (32:01):
Rough, man, I mean, it's uh, yeah, I would say
that if you look at fitness in a self destructive way, Yeah,
I know exactly, Yeah, because like they did, because you'd
have them, like you know, you'd have the Bolsheviks, and
you know, they did really well and then but then
they got you know obviously.

Speaker 1 (32:19):
Oh yeah the Bolsviks out of the Bolsheviks, yeah, all
the early Bolsheviks all died.

Speaker 2 (32:24):
Oh yeah, yeah, it was not but yeah there were
I think that, like, yeah, because like I was when
I was really trying to learn about it, it's like, yeah,
there were a lot of it's it's it's a lot
sadder like when when you go into it, because it's
like there's like a lot of really nice there are
a lot of really nice people, I know at the

(32:45):
beginning who got very killed.

Speaker 1 (32:47):
I know, there's this story I read once about how
there was this this anarchist unit fighting against the capitalists
and the revolution and they named themselves after a dead
Bolshevik comrade, like one of their friends had died, so
they named their unit after him. And then in the
middle of the night, the Bolsheviks came into the camp
and caught all our throats.

Speaker 3 (33:05):
Yeah, you know, and you're just like, oh, yeah, it's
so like if you're a modern day leftist and you're
annoyed at leftist discourse where we're always like attacking each other.

Speaker 2 (33:18):
At least it's not that.

Speaker 1 (33:21):
It's not the Russian Civil War, right.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (33:25):
Oh, Kropawkin is going to live to see some of
and it is going to break his heart. Spoiler for
the end of this episode. He does get to play
piano a lot at the end of his life. Yeah.
So he's in prison. And while he's in prison, what
does he have to spend his time with? But ads

(33:45):
just constantly blaring over loud no, no, I don't know
how they would get there. Probably in like some of
the newspapers.

Speaker 2 (33:52):
Pigeon Oh yeah, pigeon pigeon ads.

Speaker 1 (33:55):
Yeah, totally. Like some of the pigeons bring you news,
and some of the pigeons.

Speaker 2 (33:59):
Pay you as spam pigeons with like little like like
do you want more commotion in the bedroom spam pigeons?

Speaker 1 (34:09):
Uh huh. And we are brought to you by spam pigeons,
and we're back. So in eighteen seventy six, in the
story that I thought was going to be central to
this and then instead I'm going to collapse into one sentence.
With the help of his comrades, he escaped prison and escaped.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
Russian say, and he like burst through a picture of
Rita Hayworth. Yeah, and then another picture of like a glacier.

Speaker 1 (34:38):
Yeah, and his friends get him out of prison. He
gets out of Russia, he makes it to Europe. He's
imprisoned in France in eighteen eighty three.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
Yep, what do he do there?

Speaker 1 (34:48):
I think that in the post, this is a part
that like, literally right before the wire, I was like, oh,
I should look up what he was arrested for in
eighteen eighty three, and I didn't find it in time,
but I do know that post the Harris Commune, there
was this massive backlash for about fifteen years, and so
being a leftist in France was actually really hard during

(35:09):
that period. Right, but he is going to get let
out because of an international He doesn't have to escape
instead the pressure campaign from like.

Speaker 2 (35:18):
Right, he just choose his way through the bars because
they're made out a bag at.

Speaker 1 (35:22):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That is the thing that people don't
tell you about French prison. The problem is that the
bagettes are really stale, so no one wants to eat them.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
It's over a day old, so you can't.

Speaker 1 (35:32):
Yeah, no, why would you eat a dale?

Speaker 2 (35:34):
No French person would be hot dead.

Speaker 1 (35:36):
Yeah, but he's Russian and he's used to horrible ways
of now he grew up feasting. He absolutely grew up feasting,
but by this point he's actually been He doesn't exactly
have access to his family money at this point.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
Yeah, it didn't seem that way.

Speaker 1 (35:52):
And while he's in prison this time. Last time he
wrote about geology while he was in prison, this time
he's going to start writing about evolution because while he'd
been off studying geology, he'd taken an interest in zoology
and anthropology. And this was in many ways his attempts
to prove Darwin correct. And this is what radicalized him

(36:12):
in his youth, because he had gone out looking for
evidence of animals competing for resources. But what he found,
literally to his disappointment, was that instead animals were helping
each other. Within species, struggle was collective more often than
it was individual. He wrote, quote, we saw plenty of

(36:33):
adaptations for struggling, very often in common against the adverse
circumstances of climate, or against various enemies. But facts of
real competition and struggle between higher animals of the same
species came very seldom under my notice, although I eagerly
searched for them. And so he thinks at first, he's like, well,

(36:54):
I'm in Siberia, right, this isn't the tropical areas that
Darwin was looking at that are teeming with life. Maybe
this is because of where I am. Maybe cooperation is
only a rule in the frozen north. But the more
he looked, the more he saw animals of the same
species helping one another all over the world. He's got

(37:15):
some downtime in prison because he's in prison, and he
starts focusing on this stuff, and he is pissed as
hell at two different bad interpretations of evolution. He's pissed
at hell at the survival of the fittest social Darwinists
who are using Darwinism to promote capitalism and cutthroat politics
and slavery.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
Right, that's essentially that, like in nature, you can be
a dick, so why can't we.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
Right totally, which is like, oh nature, we can kill
you for being a dick too. I don't know where
you're going with this, you know.

Speaker 2 (37:44):
Yeah, are you eating your placenta? Like what are you doing?

Speaker 1 (37:47):
Yeah? Totally. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:49):
Also, by the way, don't eat your placenta.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
Oh okay, I know some hippies, so I've met people
who've done this.

Speaker 2 (37:55):
If you do, be careful don't just eat it without
knowing what you're doing.

Speaker 1 (38:00):
Okay, fair enough, I don't know anything about it. I
will take your word for it. So he's mad at that,
he's mad to social Darwinists, but he's also mad at Huxley,
Darwin's bulldog, the guy who was like, we have to
become civilized to deny our animal nature.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
Right.

Speaker 1 (38:18):
So when international pressure forces France to freak er pokin,
he moves to England and he starts writing about evolution,
and he specifically starts writing about mutual aid in response
to Huxley.

Speaker 2 (38:29):
Right, And they're like, you got loistned for that, and
then they arrest him again because he's not got a
license for writing about evolution.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
He spends his entire life both talking to like tens
and hundreds of thousands of people at a time and
fleeing countries from the police.

Speaker 2 (38:45):
Right, yeah, like that's awesome.

Speaker 1 (38:48):
I struggle to find a science guy who's more like
adventure man, you know.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
Right.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
He even started off as like almost the right wing
adventure man that everyone dreams of. He was a rich
guy who went around with just a horse and ten
of his closest friends who all have to do whatever
he says, and explored the world. You know, yeah, yeah,
And so he writes about how white tailed eagles cry
out to one another when they see food. He writes

(39:17):
about how pelicans hunt together, how penguins stick together for warmth,
how crabs turn each other back over when they get
turned upside down, which I think Darwin's grandfather also wrote about.
But he writes about how the lower animals help each
other instinctively and the higher animals use reason to care
for each other. He writes extensively about burying beetles, which

(39:40):
is a type of beetle that I'd never heard of
that burries dead matter. And the reason he liked these ones,
and the reason I like these ones because they live alone,
this is not a social animal. But when they get
but when they have to bury a really large chunk
of a dead meat thing for their larvae, they get
together with their friends. Kripawkin wrote quote. As a rule,

(40:05):
they live in isolated life. But when one of them
has discovered a corpse of a mouse or a bird
which it could hardly manage to bury itself, it calls four,
six or ten other beetles to perform the operation with
united efforts.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
You actually see this, like in animals that are often solitary,
but then they are in some circumstance they have to
do stuff together and they can kind of work it out.
Like octopuses are usually very solitary, but then when they're
sometimes an area where it's like really richly populated by nutrients,

(40:40):
like they might hang out and they still are like
kind of like this is what's funny is they're still
kind of loners. Like they're not like suddenly like hugging
each other and cuddling, and but they're like tolerating each
other fine, and you know, trying to like be sort
of neighborly with like sometimes they throw things at each
other when they're annoyed, but other than that, they're like, yeah,

(41:01):
I mean we can just like hang out together because
this is a good area. Like if you want to
get really tiny, there's this really weird I mean this
involves a lot of different kind of like evolutionary biology weirdness.
There are certain slime molds that can like basically there
are these unicellular organisms, but then like they can congeal

(41:21):
together and then form like a slug, and that slug
then who will develop like a stock that has like
a fruiting body that releases like some of these like
spores essentially, and it's like these are unicellular organisms. They're
not thinking like this isn't really a moral kind of

(41:44):
thing because it's like it's also not necessarily like they
don't necessarily have a chance to go off and find
a better environment or colonize somewhere else unless they do this.
The ones at the top of the fruiting body are
the winners essentially, and it's more or less luck that
they get there. This is not really a case of like, uh, yeah,

(42:06):
they got there because they just rock the hardest necessarily,
like a lot of it's luck. And then the ones
that are part of the stock actually like die off.
They don't get to go off and do this thing.
But it still is a successful strategy because some of
the ones who do this and have this behavior you
know in their genetic library, do go off and survive.

(42:31):
And so like I think that it's like it's not
always something where it's like animals doing this because they're empathetic, right,
unicellular organism doesn't really have empathy, like not take I
don't think they have empathy, but it's doing it because
there is a successful strategy, you could still say like, oh, well,

(42:51):
it's still selfish because it's still genetic information trying to
propagate itself. It's like, yeah, yeah, but when you have
a complex system of that, you have altruistic behaviors, either
consciously or done by unicellular organisms that don't have morality.

Speaker 1 (43:09):
Okay, I'm really really excited that you were the guests
for this episode. I already was. But this is exactly
Kropowkin's point on a bunch of these levels, including when
I was saying that he theorized stuff that couldn't be
proven yet. He specifically was like, I bet this will
even be true for microbial life once we can actually
study microbial life. And now we've studied it and it's true.

(43:30):
And also this idea that like because if you take
a certain Darwinistic approach, you're like, the only winner is
the one that fox right. But yeah, solidarity, there's so
many examples in the natural world where participating in a
participating in a thing that's even maybe dangerous to yourself

(43:53):
is still an overall winning strategy for the larger community.
And so therefore, like you said, things that have an
instinct towards community propagate even if the individual doesn't. Right.

Speaker 2 (44:07):
There is like a huge debate in evolutionary biology about
group selection, and like there's a lot of back and forth,
Like I mean, like, for instance, EO. Wilson like going
back on his old stuff, and so I think, no,
I was actually wrong about this. I don't think that
group selection is a thing. But I'm not like an
expert on this whole debate. Like, but from my understanding

(44:29):
is that what we can't deny is that you have
social groups and animals that act altruistically. That's not like
a question, right, The question is like is evolution acting
on the individual or on the group level. There's a
lot of like kind of debate about that. I think
that it's really important to note that you can have

(44:52):
like a selfish gene right, Like the idea that that
like your genes or your your genetics, like there's like
selfish pressures for that to propagate. There's not necessarily there
couldn't be such a thing as like a self sacrificing
genetic composition because that would die out. But the problem
with that is that once you incorporate group dynamics, right,

(45:14):
it makes things a lot more complicated, so that when
you do have altruistic behavior in a group, those behaviors
in general can be rewarded and can get passed on.
So there's like a lot of debate about at sort
of like which level the evolution is like influencing, right,
But it's not really a question that you do end

(45:36):
up having altruistic behaviors, either consciously altruistic or quote unquote altruistic,
which is like when it's a slime mold and it
doesn't know what it's doing.

Speaker 1 (45:47):
But that's like, I mean, this is something that I
remember really consciously thinking about because I came from more
of a like self interested perspective when I was younger,
which I'm not really proud of, but like the appeal
of something like socialism or communism or anarchism or whatever
for me has always been like, well, actually, by participating
in a group that believes in solidarity, other people have

(46:11):
my back. And so even though in the most individual moment,
in the most individual moment, watching my own skin feels
like the most selfish thing to do, that's like a
lower version of it. Whereas I when I actually want,
what I want is to be happy and taken care
of and stuff like that, right, and have other people
on my back, and that means that I have to

(46:32):
participate in a culture where we all have each other's backs.
And so it's counterintuitive, but I believe it and I
think it's real that the best way for me to
live a full and free and happy and healthy life
is to care for other people. And not even because
one for one they'll take care of me, but rather

(46:53):
by participating in a society that does that, by all
of us having the instinct to send out slime mold spores,
I might get to be one of those spores, whereas
otherwise I just like straight.

Speaker 2 (47:03):
Up won't right exactly, Yeah, And I.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
Don't know, I'm really excited about it. And so what
Kapakkin does and Darwin did this too, and they're just
actually changing which emphasis where they emphasize things. But Kapakin
is saying, there's two kinds of struggle in the natural world.
There's a struggle of one against another for limited resources,
like the you know, the two animals fighting to the

(47:27):
death in the woods or whatever, right.

Speaker 2 (47:29):
Right, which certainly happened.

Speaker 1 (47:30):
Absolutely, and that's like real and it causes competition, but
it is not the defining form of struggle. According to Kopotkin,
then there is the struggle against the harsh environment, which
causes cooperation. And this actually gets it a thing that
you also said. He's really specific that this isn't a
moral decision, right, this is actually like a he's not

(47:53):
being like, ah, yes, the best thing for evolution is
if we're all saintly, you know. He's like, no, it
just this is actually the strategy. This is the fittest.
To be fittest is to be participating in this, you know.
And I love it because I'm like, I'm like that beetle.
I'm like, no, I want to be left the fuck alone.
But sometimes you gotta bury a body, I mean, take
care of.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
Something, and right, gotta feed your babies.

Speaker 1 (48:17):
Yeah, exactly, which is the actual purpose of burying that body? Yes,
And he's writing in response to Huxley, and he writes
that we shouldn't go against our nature to build these
civilized structures and these power structures, you know, which Huxley
believes we have to live in tension with ourselves and
build these things. Right. Instead, our goal is to nurture

(48:39):
the part of ourselves that naturally rely on mutual aid
He's not saying that there isn't competition. He's not saying
that humans are just naturally good. He's saying that humans
are naturally good and bad, and we can instead build
social structures that foster and nurture the better parts of ourselves.

Speaker 2 (48:57):
Yeah, I mean, especially like there are of animals where
you don't see this sort of like collectivism or mutualism.
It's war just kind of frank competition. But like I
would say, particularly humans, and I mean there's many many
other animals like this as well, like across philums. So,
but humans like we are I think there was like

(49:21):
our evolutionary history does seem to favor the model of
collective animal behavior, where it's like, yeah, we're cooperative, that's how,
that's how it works, like because we're not necessarily when
you have a social animal, you can have really weird
hierarchical structures, like you look at ants. On one hand,

(49:44):
you can look at that as like it's like a
royal hierarchy the queen.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
The queen has the best life and everyone else's life
sucks or whatever it's I.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
Mean, when you're actually looking at quality of life, I
wouldn't necessarily say that's true in an ant colony because
the queen is like this breeding factory for young. It's
not not necessarily easy, but the ants aren't. They aren't
really thinking at all about their lifestyle. It's it's when

(50:12):
you look into ant genetics it gets really weird because
you're basically the way their sort of royal society works
is through a lot of weird genetic shenanigans where you're
basically pumping out things that are we'll say, like so
haploid and diploid is. I don't want to get too

(50:33):
much into the weeds on this, but it's like you
can like basically pass on one set of genes or
two set of genes, and through some of these shenanigans
you end up creating a like genetic relatedness that makes
it like sustainable. So like when you look at like
a an animal system, right where you have interactions among animals,

(50:57):
there's usually some need for an equal and that can
arise in many different ways. Can be sort of the
classic like purely pure competition, but in many many cases
you have cooperation within the species, often you know, outside

(51:18):
of the species, certainly with animals that form complicated social groups.
This is also often the case, and like, there's this interesting.
I'm not like an expert on human anthropology. There's a
lot of concepts in terms of human evolutionary history where
it's like we kind of like it's a weird way
to put it, but the idea of like we domesticated

(51:39):
ourselves where we selected for less aggression because like you know,
just it was easier to have a chiller social group.
Even with competitive animals, they will try to find ways
not to hurt each other when they can because they

(52:02):
don't want to get.

Speaker 1 (52:03):
Hurt, right, It is almost more of a sport than
a like gladiatorial death match. I see, even like the
gladiator fights were actually more of a sport than a
death match historically.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
But yeah, there's certainly gladiatorial death matches in the animal
Kingdom that happens all the time, but more often you
may not see this as much on Animal Planet because
it's not as exciting. They'll like measure each other up
and be like no, no, you're you would totally kill
me and I don't want anything to do with that.
And the one that would be the victor like lets

(52:32):
the future loser go because like the victor also doesn't
like even if it could win, it doesn't want to
sustain an injury. And then you get really funny, Like
there's this fish called the sarcastic fringe head and it
has this really weird it's a weird little fish that's
got a giant head and a weird tiny body, and

(52:55):
they kind of compete for burrows and stuff. But the
way they do it instead of like fighting each other
is they can unfold their mouths, kind of like predator
in alien vis.

Speaker 1 (53:06):
I've been looking at a picture of this. Now, this
is what nightmares are made of.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
It's nightmarish. But like they unfurl their mouth and kind
of do this like competitive kissing on each other where
they like sort of smash into each other. I just
had Karagaimo, she's a science writer, and she's talking about
like this competitive kissing of theirs. But it's like researchers
don't necessarily know exactly why they do this, but the

(53:32):
idea is that it is a symbolic method of resolving
conflict without hurting each other because that makes it easier
on both of them.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
Yeah, no, that I mean that makes sense. And like
I think people want to believe in the specific cut
and dry gladiatorial death match. And again, the fact that
gladiatorial matches weren't death matches by and large is like
even a way which we look at our own human
history and are like, ah, right, we used to kill
each other all the time, you know. And I mean, yes,

(54:06):
that's true, but not to the degree that people think
it is. And I never found this article again, and
I'm annoyed. But decades ago, when I was a what
was the word detrite war detritivar, Yes, I was digging
through trash cans in New York City and I found
a science magazine the big article about why there are
so many gay animals, and the article was basically this

(54:27):
long form Well, it turns out this kooky evolutionary biologist
named Peter Kropotkin was right, oh wow, because mutual aid
is often about a community survival, not individual survival, and
gay animals make a great adoptive parents. And also like
kind of just make everyone in the community happier because
there's like gender variation essentially, and like, yeah, so people

(54:50):
who are living these longer, happier reproductive lives, even if
they don't themselves have offspring. It's the argument that this
article made again that I've never been able to find. Again.
I found articles about gay animals, but it's like it's
really hard to find articles from like two thousand and
four by using search. You know, there is some irony
to say the one negative thing I will say about Kropawkin.

(55:11):
There's irony in Kerpawkin's ideas being used to defend homosexuality
because Kripakin was slightly conservative on that issue. I've found
nothing of him attacking say negative things about gay people.
But the anarchist movement was much more pro homosexuality than
most other leftists at the time. But I can find
instances of him not offering solidarity to persecuted queer folks.

(55:34):
When Oscar Wilde was on trial, he was a big
fan of Kropotkin. He wrote Kropakin to support his case
and Kerpokin didn't. I've since read that the feminist Emma
Goldman got him to turn around on the issue, but
I haven't found the source on that yet, so I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (55:50):
Would you say his progress in that regard was somewhat glacial.

Speaker 1 (55:57):
I would indeed slow moving, viscous fluid. His ideas about
evolution were incredibly influential in Russia more than anywhere else,
partly because Russian scientists just couldn't resonate with the like
Malthusian obsession with overpopulation that Darwin was basing a lot
of his stuff on. Russia at the time was vast

(56:18):
and empty. To quote Daniel P. Toad's quote, for a
Russian to see an inexorably increasing population inevitably straining potential
supplies of food and space required quite a leap of imagination.
There's a lot of Russia.

Speaker 2 (56:33):
Yeah, Like for Russians, I think like when they had famine,
they were able to connect it really clearly to policy
like war, Like when there's like a war against Sweden
and then you have a famine in there, like, hey,
this famine is man made. It's not because there's too
many of.

Speaker 1 (56:51):
Us, right, totally, totally. The argument that Kerpawkin had against
Huxley was actually the same he had against Marx Arcs
was like, we must reach the highest stage of development,
whereas Korpawkin was like, we're actually already great. We just
need to get better organizational systems and encourage our cooperative nature.
Kropakin was one of the world's first international celebrities. His

(57:14):
ideas about how society might work, about who we can
be were wildly popular. Tens of thousands of people would
come to his talks all over the world while he's
dodging police everywhere. And when the Tsar was deposed in
February nineteen seventeen in Russia, before the Bolsheviks sort of
from my position stage a coup against the revolution, Kropakin

(57:37):
and his family moved back to Russia. They're like, hooray,
no more Czar. We don't know exactly what's going to happen,
but no more Czar, We're going home.

Speaker 2 (57:45):
Right.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
He's not a young man at.

Speaker 2 (57:47):
This point, is he solidly in his Santa yes stage.

Speaker 1 (57:50):
Yeah, he's only got a couple of years left to live.
And when the Bolsheviks take power, they really want to
kind of have Kropotkin on their side. Some of the
anarchists douce which over and joined the Bolsheviks because it's
kind of the best thing going. They wanted to pay
lip service to Krapakin because he's one of the most
famous men in the world, but he hated them and
they hated him. They confiscated his apartment and moved his

(58:11):
family into a barely heated house in the country. The
family survived off of milk from the cow in the
yard and the food brought to them by anarchists. And
I've read that he spent his last few years watching
the revolution that he had been working his whole life
for be torn apart by Bolsheviks, and he despaired. Younger
comrades would visit and be like, what should we do,

(58:33):
and he was like, it's over, We've lost, We're doomed.

Speaker 2 (58:39):
Yeah, He's like, it's more like bullshit, and then he dies.

Speaker 1 (58:45):
His last words, he spends the last years of his
life playing piano, living in a tiny and barely heated house.
There's still like kind of a beauty to like I
think about the like, all right, he can't do anything anymore.
It's just going to make art. He's just going to
play music, you know.

Speaker 2 (59:00):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:02):
He died on February eighth, nineteen twenty one, and the
Bolsheviks tried again to co opt his legacy, but his
daughter Alexandra fought them tooth and nail. Basically, they were like,
we want to bury him in the like martyr hero
Bolshevik zone, and she was like, there is no way
he will be buried. There tens of thousands or one
hundred thousand people marched at his funeral, the last time

(59:24):
in anarchist demonstration was permitted in Russia until the fall
of the USSR, you know, seventy years later. But for
just who gets the last laugh? That guy that Kropakin
used to argue with Huxley. I only made this connection
while researching this episode, that Huxley is the grandfather of
the author Aldous Huxley, who's famous for writing A Brave

(59:46):
New World. Yeah, Alice Huxley was a Kropakinist. In the
introduction to was My Island, he wrote, and I'm paraphrasing
from memory here, he wrote, what the world needs now
is decentralization Kropotkinesque manner. So Kropawkin may not have convinced
Huxley the grandfather, but he got the youth.

Speaker 2 (01:00:08):
He got the youth nice. That's like the bearing beetles
of philosophy. Okay, hang on, I can do this. I
can do this. Everyone hang on right right the philosophical
paradigm shift. Bearing beetles took his body, buried it, and
then the young men upon his ideas. So the young

(01:00:30):
Huxley was like the larva feeding on his corpse of
ideas so he could become a beautiful beetle.

Speaker 1 (01:00:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:00:40):
By like the sixties and seventies, evolutionary biology started studying
more actively cooperation, including cooperation where like an individual squirrel
will announce when a predator is near, just warn its
fellow squirrels, even though that gets that squirrel eaten, right,
because all of the squirrels are safer if they live
in a squirrel society where you do. That is the argument.

Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
I think this is a behavior I think specific to
ground squirrels. There might be some of that behavior also
for other kinds of squirrels, but ground squirrels live there's
sort of the mirrorkats of North America because like they
live in these communal dens and stuff. So you see
that a lot in ground squirrels, and you see it
in a lot of rabbits, you see it in meerkats, groundhogs.

(01:01:26):
They live in like either a warren or a communal
set of burrows and dens, and then they will warn
the entire colony and then which puts them at risk.
And you also see kind of interesting like cross species
like other species will give out warning signs and then
sometimes like other species like learn each other's warning signals

(01:01:50):
and benefit from each other. So like they're not necessarily
trying to help out this other species. But then sometimes
they end up learning each other's warning signs and then
they both benefit from this interaction.

Speaker 1 (01:02:04):
That's cool. So watching science have come around a lot
to his ideas makes me happy. I hope we can
understand better mutual aid is good for us. That's my thesis. Yeah, well,
thanks for listening to me talk about anarchy, Santa.

Speaker 2 (01:02:26):
No, this is this is real fun for me. I'm
not much of a history buff. I get very much
into the specific weeds about stuff. So I really love
kind of zooming out and actually looking into the history
because like, a lot of my understanding of evolutionary biology
probably comes from this guy and I didn't even know it.

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
Yeah, and like people who are then influenced by him
or yeah, like it's and I love that right because
it's not even though I started off episode one by
being like, ah, fuck the great man history thing, and
then then part two I'm like, this is the man
who discovered that glaciers move, This is the guy who
figured out the ice ages, you know, and he would
be so mad about being great man, because yeah, like

(01:03:05):
we all learn things and develop things and and build
upon what all of us do.

Speaker 2 (01:03:12):
Yeah, I mean, I think it's you know, I think
it's fair enough to say that, Like, sure someone probably
would have come up with this, but he did totally
and that's cool. And maybe he did it sooner than
if someone else said done it later, And maybe he
did it in a way like the way he introduced
these ideas might have been good in specific ways. So yeah,

(01:03:34):
I mean, I think, you know, I think certainly individuals
do have an impact. Then we're all we're all worms essentially.

Speaker 1 (01:03:41):
Totally eating dirt. Well, glad to be in the podcast
dirt Eating with you. But if people want to see
the remnants of the dirt that you eat for a podcast,
where can they do that? Right?

Speaker 2 (01:03:53):
Where do you listen to my poop that turns into
pop soil?

Speaker 1 (01:03:58):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:03:58):
So, Creature Feature is an evolutionary biology podcast. You certainly
do not need to be an evolutionary biologist or scientist
to listen to it. It's casual conversations where we talk
about really cool stuff and evolutionary biology and just lots
of like fun animal facts like the sarcastic French head
thing I was talking about on this episode. I just

(01:04:20):
did an episode. I don't know when this one comes out,
but you know, maybe recently with Kara Jaim we talked
about weird deep sea creatures and their behaviors. So yeah,
if you enjoyed this, you probably enjoy that. And if
you like history. There's another podcast I'm on called Secretly
Incredibly Fascinating, with Elec Schmidt, who does all the work,

(01:04:43):
and I sit there and listen and learn to him
and sometimes.

Speaker 1 (01:04:49):
Say, thing, you get to be the podcast idiot.

Speaker 2 (01:04:52):
I do it. It's beautiful. I love it so much.
And he does a really good job doing a deep
dive on things that see boring, like paper clips, WD forty,
popcorn ceilings, and every time I'm like, Alex, there's no
way you're gonna get me interested in this, and then
he gosh darn it, he does it.

Speaker 1 (01:05:13):
Well. Now I want to listen to the popcorn ceiling
one because I hate popcorn ceilings, but right, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
Yeah, there's one on popcorn ceilings.

Speaker 1 (01:05:21):
If you want to follow me and places that aren't audio,
I write a substack almost every week. Margat kildroid at
substock dot com. I talk a lot about things I've
learned from history, hope in the face of bad stuff,
and sometimes my dog. Almost everything I post there is
free and Sophie, what do you got? Sophie's like I'm

(01:05:42):
dealing with the doctor.

Speaker 2 (01:05:43):
Yeah, I was picking up Truman.

Speaker 3 (01:05:46):
Coolson Media dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:05:49):
All right, see y'all next week.

Speaker 2 (01:05:55):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media.

Speaker 1 (01:05:59):
The more podcas cast on Google zone Media.

Speaker 2 (01:06:01):
Visit our website Goolezonmedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.