Prince Kropotkin meets the Hutchinson niche

ISRAEL JOURNAL OF ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION, 
Vol. 55, 2009, pp. 1–10 
DOI: 10.1560/IJEE.55.1.1
 E-mail: rdholt@zoo.ufl.edu 
The IJEE Soapbox provides an informal forum for leading ecologists and evolutionary biologists to expound on issues that they find particularly exciting, thought provoking, and novel.

 Robert D. Holt is our first invited IJEE Soapbox essayist. Bob is Professor of Biology and Arthur R. Marshall, Jr., Chair in Ecology at the University of Florida, and is one of the foremost theoreticians in ecology and evolutionary biology. His research focuses on theoretical and conceptual issues at the population and community levels of ecological organization and on linking ecology with evolutionary biology. Bob is best known for his pioneering work on apparent competition, multispecies interactions in food webs (community modules) in time and space, and the evolution of niche conservatism. 

IJEE Soapbox: Prince Kropotkin meets the Hutchinson niche
Robert D. Holt 
Department of Biology 
University of Florida, 
Gainesville, Florida 32611-8525, USA 
Siberia in the winter is among the harshest ecosystems on earth, or so it must have seemed to the Russian nobleman Prince Petr Kropotkin back in the 19th century as he wandered in his scientific expeditions, winding through that seemingly endless wilderness of dark brooding forest and treacherous bog. In the course of his personal evolution from a privileged member of the elite, to an advocate for the oppressed peasantry and industrial workers and Russia’s foremost anarchist-communist, he published a provocative work, Mutual Aid (1902, reprinted 2005), reflecting on natural and human systems, and the drivers of evolution in both. He drew upon his observations of animal and human life in Siberia to counter the grim world view of the social Darwinists, who asserted that the raw competitive struggle of individual against individual was the prime driver of evolution. Kropotkin believed his observations in Siberia showed that individual struggle against the forces of the environment was inadequate to explain persistence in that brutal realm, and that cooperation, rather than competition, must be an essential force in evolution (Gould, 1977, provides a fine essay on Kropotkin).