Adriana Novoa and Alex Levine offer here a history and interpretation of the reception of Darwinism in Argentina, illuminating the ways culture shapes ...

. This article analyzes how scientific thinking evolved in Argentina during the 1820s and 1830s. I will focus on liberals’ association of science with the emergence of a new male sensibility that feminized the role of men in society. This gendered scientific culture explains how liberals clashed in the 1830s with the policies of the governor of Buenos Aires, Juan Manuel de Rosas, whose hyper masculinist model based on the authority of the father was perceived not only as anti-civilization, but (...) also as anti-science. This association of gender and science helps us to explain how the introduction of Darwinian ideas that seemed to support a more masculinist representation of evolution, now ruled by laws of survival and competition, was perceived as a contradiction of past ideas by the 1870s. (shrink)

In this chapter we will try to show how the introduction of Darwinian evolutionary theory transformed metaphysics, and in particular, the philosophical understanding of the temporality of being. In the interests of brevity, we will focus on two particularly significant aspects of the impact of Darwinism on Latin America. We will consider, first, how the new evolutionary thought transformed past notions of temporality. Second, we will discuss the ways in which the ideas of regression and extinction, viewed as essential components (...) of the evolutionary process, problematized the nature of progress and civilization. We trace these developments in the work of three central figures of Latin American thought: José Martí, José Rodó, and Euclides da Cunha. All three of these men were extraordinarily versatile thinkers, and each has been the subject of voluminous secondary literature. But the first two, unlike some other influential figures—such as, famously, Domingo Sarmiento of Argentina—were hardly self-professed Darwinians. Still, we have chosen to discuss them because of this last fact, and not despite it. As for da Cunha, though he accepted the basic canons of the new evolutionary theory, he remained ambivalent about its application. All three struggled, each in his own way, to come to terms with the Darwinian legacy, and each found his thinking profoundly shaped by this struggle; they offer us three different, unique perspectives on the impact of Darwinism. The magnitude of the new evolutionism can only be understood if we consider the wide range of discussion it triggered in consequence of its profound philosophical impact. (shrink)

ArgumentThe spread of Darwinian ideas by the late nineteenth century in Argentina transformed the intellectual elites' notion of progress and civilization. While before Darwin, union, harmony, and assimilation were the ideas most commonly associated with the civilizatory process; variation, struggle, and divergence dominated the post-Darwin discussion. More importantly, unlike in Europe, in Argentina the theory not only triggered interest in the process of speciation, but also its relationship with extinction. Extinction became the benchmark of progress, and the sign of success (...) for the nation. If the country was civilizing itself, the “natural” elimination of inferior individuals, unfit for the struggle for existence, had to be proved and displayed. The origin of modernity was here associated with the existence of evolutionary waste that revealed the work of natural selection on behalf of national improvement. (shrink)