Microcosm_ E. Coli and the New Science of Life - Carl Zimmer [44]
Six
DEATH AND KINDNESS
THE ANARCHIST PRINCE
CHARLES DARWIN WAS BURIED DURING a grand funeral in Westminster Abbey in 1882. Biologists were soon fighting over his legacy. In 1888, the British zoologist Thomas Huxley published a shocking essay, “Struggle for Existence and Its Bearing upon Man.” In it he summoned up an ugly picture of nature as a combat of all against all. “The animal world is on about the same level as the gladiator’s show,” he wrote. “The creatures are fairly well-treated, and set to fight—whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given.” In order to be moral, Huxley believed, humans had to work against nature.
Huxley’s essay drew a stinging attack from an anarchist prince. Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin was born in 1842 to a wealthy Russian nobleman. In his teenage years he served as a page to Tsar Alexander II, but he became disillusioned with the court and went to Siberia to serve in the army. There he worked as the secretary of a prison-reform committee, and the horrors he witnessed in the labor camps turned him into a radical anarchist. At the same time, he was developing into a first-rate scientist. Kropotkin joined a geographic survey in 1864 and spent the next eight years studying the Siberian landscape.
On his return from Siberia, Kropotkin soon ended up in jail for his politics. He escaped and fled to Europe, where he wrote pamphlets that earned him fame and more time in jail. Huxley’s essay appeared just as Kropotkin had emerged from a three-year stint in a French prison. He settled in England, where he immediately set about writing a series of essays attacking what he saw as Huxley’s distortion of both man and nature. His essays were eventually published as the best-selling book Mutual Aid.
Human morality is not artificial, Kropotkin argued, but in fact profoundly natural. “Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle,” he wrote. Cooperation has evolved thanks to the advantages it offers over selfish behavior. Animals do not abandon one another but instead show care and concern. He recounted example after example of kindness in the animal kingdom, from horses that helped one another escape a grassland fire to horseshoe crabs righting overturned friends.
One can only wonder what Kropotkin would have thought of E. coli. Perhaps he would have been pleased to watch billions of microbes working together to build biofilms, to follow their swarming flocks traveling with intertwined flagella. He might have been startled by the selfless sacrifice of bacteria exploding with colicins that kill other strains. Or perhaps he would not have been startled at all. E. coli’s spirit of cooperation came as something of a surprise to scientists at the end of the twentieth century, but Kropotkin had written prophetic words a hundred years earlier: “Mutual aid is met with even amidst the lowest animals,” he wrote, “and we must be prepared to learn some day, from the students of microscopic pond-life, facts of unconscious mutual support, even from the life of micro-organisms.”
Kropotkin belonged to the same scientific era as Darwin. He was an observant nineteenth-century naturalist with no understanding of DNA and its mutations. It was not until the mid-1900s that scientists recognized how mutations arise in individuals and help them outcompete other members of their species. But when