Arturo Argueta Villamar

Darwinism in Latin America: Reception and Introduction

In natural history, the paradigm of classification held a privileged place during the eighteenth century, briefly ceding to transmutation during the end of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The break between fixism and evolutionism provoked the substitution of natural history for biology. Of all the proposals regarding the origin of species, the most accepted theory at the end of the nineteenth century was the idea of evolution by natural selection. In this chapter, we will analyze the reception and introduction of Darwinian evolutionism in various Latin American countries between the late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.