In order to explore how Argentina’s particular interests, ambitions, political anxieties, and prejudices shaped scientific research, From Man to Ape focuses on Darwin’s use of analogies. Both analogy and metaphor are culturally situated, and by studying scientific activity at Europe’s geographical and cultural periphery, Novoa and Levine show that familiar analogies assume unfamiliar and sometimes startling guises in Argentina. The transformation of these analogies in the Argentine context led science—as well as the interaction between science, popular culture, and public policy—in surprising directions. In diverging from European models, Argentine Darwinism reveals a great deal about both Darwinism and science in general.
Novel in its approach and its subject, From Man to Ape reveals a new way of understanding Latin American science and its impact on the scientific communities of Europe and North America.
In order to explore how Argentina’s particular interests, ambitions, political anxieties, and prejudices shaped scientific research, From Man to Ape focuses on Darwin’s use of analogies. Both analogy and metaphor are culturally situated, and by studying scientific activity at Europe’s geographical and cultural periphery, Novoa and Levine show that familiar analogies assume unfamiliar and sometimes startling guises in Argentina. The transformation of these analogies in the Argentine context led science—as well as the interaction between science, popular culture, and public policy—in surprising directions. In diverging from European models, Argentine Darwinism reveals a great deal about both Darwinism and science in general.
Novel in its approach and its subject, From Man to Ape reveals a new way of understanding Latin American science and its impact on the scientific communities of Europe and North America.
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In order to explore how Argentina’s particular interests, ambitions, political anxieties, and prejudices shaped scientific research, From Man to Ape focuses on Darwin’s use of analogies. Both analogy and metaphor are culturally situated, and by studying scientific activity at Europe’s geographical and cultural periphery, Novoa and Levine show that familiar analogies assume unfamiliar and sometimes startling guises in Argentina. The transformation of these analogies in the Argentine context led science—as well as the interaction between science, popular culture, and public policy—in surprising directions. In diverging from European models, Argentine Darwinism reveals a great deal about both Darwinism and science in general.
Novel in its approach and its subject, From Man to Ape reveals a new way of understanding Latin American science and its impact on the scientific communities of Europe and North America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226596167 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2010 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
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From Man to Ape
Darwinism in Argentina, 1870–1920By ADRIANA NOVOA ALEX LEVINE
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2010 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-59616-7
Chapter One
The Roots of Evolutionary Thought in Argentina
The paleontological significance of the region that today comprises Argentina dates back to the late colonial era. In 1789 a specimen of the giant ground sloth Megatherium was unearthed in Luján, in the province of Buenos Aires. It made its way to Madrid, where it attracted a great deal of attention. King Charles III, in the belief that the fossil represented an extant species, ordered local authorities to find and ship him a living specimen. In Martin Rudwick's account, the bones were "assembled at the Gabinete Real (Royal Museum) by Juan-Bautista Bru (1740–1799), a conservator there." Later, in 1796, "a French official who was visiting Madrid saw the skeleton and obtained a set of Bru's unpublished plates. These were sent to the Institut [de France] in Paris, and Cuvier was asked to report on them" (Rudwick 1998, 25).
Thus, it was the young Georges Cuvier who would claim priority for his formal description of the specimen and the name of the species, which "greatly increased his personal stake in the field of fossil anatomy." Furthermore, while the megatherium itself "remained in Madrid, Cuvier's paper—published in the Magasin encyclopédique [of 1796] ... made the fossil widely known" (Rudwick 1998, 26). Cuvier's conclusion, that a previously unknown terrestrial animal of such great size must be extinct, had far-reaching consequences. And though he mistakenly reported the fossil as having been unearthed in Paraguay, the sensation created by his account helped draw the eyes of the community of European naturalists in the general direction of what would soon become Argentina. A rival description by José Garriga (1796), published in Spanish shortly after Cuvier's and with more detailed engravings, gave the correct location and also attracted a great of deal international attention.
The discovery of the Megatherium put the Pampas on the scientific map. Scientists continued to be interested in the region after the separation from Spain that began in 1810 and would give rise to a formally independent Argentina with the declaration of independence of 1816. In the early days of postcoloniality in Spanish America, the study of the natural world and its evolutionary transformation was fostered by a series of European explorers. They made discoveries, ordered and classified the environment, and established lasting relationships with locals in a position to gather further specimens for European collections. In Argentina interest in the sciences also gained early support from Enlightenment-inspired leaders like Bernardino Rivadavia, who in 1812 wrote the decree creating the Museo Público of Buenos Aires, one of the first institutions of its kind in South America (Sheets-Pyenson 1988, 60–61).
From the local point of view, these expeditions were strategically important because they were associated with developing key resources. While river courses were of obvious economic significance, the geology and zoology of the region had also begun to attract significant scientific attention by the 1820s, for similar reasons. Given the expense and risk associated with mounting an expedition, beginning early in the century European naturalists were wont to encourage locals who possessed the necessary skills, resources, and inclination, to do the legwork. One such was the Buenos Aires–educated naturalist Father Dámaso Antonio Larrañaga (1771–1848), whose work was followed in France. He was born in what would later become Uruguay, where he spent most of his life and did a large part his research. In an 1822 letter to Larrañaga, French explorer Louis de Freycinet (1779–1842) remarks, "The French savants wish to have the benefit of your research, and I permit myself to hope that you will direct some communication to them. Mr. Cuvier, with whom I have spoken regarding your discoveries in natural history, would be most pleased to receive an account of them. I described you to the Geographical Society as a scholar most suited to the useful advancement of the fair science to which that institution is devoted. They desire to count you among their correspondents" (Arechavaleta 1894, xxxii). In addition to Freycinet, Larrañaga would correspond with Alexander von Humboldt, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Georges Cuvier. His work promoted the interest in the natural riches of South America, particularly in areas endowed with paleontological resources.
The abundance of fossil deposits in the Pampas and Patagonia brought several important foreign naturalists to the country during the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin the most celebrated among them. In 1833 he arrived with the crew of the Beagle. Once in Buenos Aires, he made the acquaintance of well-connected members of the English-speaking community there, as well as meeting Juan Manuel de Rosas, the powerful political leader of Buenos Aires who would rule the entire country as dictator until 1852. At the time, as Darwin himself reported in a letter to his sister Caroline, Rosas was prosecuting "a bloody war of extermination against the Indians." He was good enough to donate war-surplus horses for Darwin's exploration of the interior—and so, ironically, Rosas, who, in the received view of the late nineteenth-century Argentine establishment, was a barbarian and an enemy of science, deserves some credit for one of the most important field expeditions by the most revolutionary scientist of the age. Darwin's letter to Caroline continues by observing that "so fine an opportunity for Geology was not to be neglected." On the trail, he would "become quite a Gaucho, drink [his] Mattee & smoke [his] cigar, and then lie down & sleep as comfortably with the Heavens for a Canopy as in a feather bed.—It is such a fine healthy life, on horse back all day, eating nothing but meat, & sleeping in a bracing air, one awakes fresh as a lark."
The fact that Darwin had spent time in Argentina, done pioneering work in natural history, and made important contacts would be important in years to come. His acquaintances in the English-speaking community allowed him to stay in touch and provided a channel for communications regarding his scientific findings. One of these acquaintances, a British merchant named Edward Lumb, became a correspondent of Darwin's. According to Orione and Rocchi (1986), Darwin's ongoing contact with Lumb facilitated his correspondence with Franciso Muñiz when Darwin was searching for information about the vaca ñata (ñata oxen). In the 1840s this led, in turn, to their exchanges regarding Muñiz's saber-tooth specimen.
By the early 1830s, the results of scientific expeditions in the country were being rapidly disseminated by means of a network that encompassed not only Europe, but also Latin America. For example, in 1831, a report on an expedition by French explorer Narcisse Parchappe, an artillery officer who exiled himself to Corrientes following the Bourbon restoration and subsequently became an associate of Bonpland's and d'Orbigny's, was published in the Revista y repertorio bimestre de la Isla de Cuba. The Paris correspondent for the Revista had encountered Parchappe following his return to France in the wake of the July Revolution. He concludes that this traveler had "devoted his full attention to the geography of the regions he visited, collecting materials of great significance for improving knowledge of the Republic of Buenos-Aires, and the uses and customs of its natives. He has traced the courses of the Paraná and Uruguay, two rivers still poorly known, as well as most of the other rivers of this vast territory, as far as Patagonia. His account will be published shortly" ("Noticias" 1831, 367).
The close association of science and politics was typical of Spanish American countries in which liberal administrations, steeped in European ideas and eager to show the world their interest in progressive, modern government, facilitated and often sponsored the work of European explorers. For example, when in the 1820s and 1830s the Chilean government authorized the wide-ranging expeditions of French naturalist Claude Gay (1800–1863), one of its goals was to communicate the sense that Chile, its natural environment having been classified and therefore at least partially tamed, was progressing. Nor were the authorities wrong to think that such activity would bolster their international image. Years later, in November 1853, the "Monthly Record of Current Events" in Harper's New Monthly Magazine reported that for some years, "the government of Chili has devoted a good deal of attention to the progress of science. In 1833, it gave authority to Mr. Claude Gay, a French naturalist, to collect data for a political and physical history of the country: twelve volumes of which have already been published." Furthermore, "a topological survey of the country" was underway; schools were being built "for gratuitous instruction in the mechanic arts, in agriculture, painting, and music," and Chile was thus generally "acquiring high distinction among the nations for the encouragement she extends to science" ("Monthly Record" 1853). The promotion of science went hand in hand with capitalism and political liberalism; together, they were described as the solution for political and economic progress, at least in the view of the Latin Americans who promoted the supremacy of European ideas.
In an 1833 address to the French Academy of Sciences, Gay had acknowledged the importance of scientific exchange for Latin America, as well as the relationship between science and "the utility of its applications in various branches of industry." Scientific exchanges had become all the more fruitful "since the end of the last century" because of two factors, the "true philosophical spirit that now guides students even in their earliest studies" and the "numerous scientific voyages undertaken to distant countries, whether by persons attached to some government, or by private individuals" (Gay 1833, 369). Having been sponsored by the Chilean government, Gay was also in a position to comment on the relationship between science and political liberalism. Zealous though he had been when he first left France, encountering "such royal munificence on the part of a republican government raised [his] enthusiasm still further" (373).
While Latin American voyages of exploration by European naturalists earned them accolades back home, we also find that locals interested in their own natural environment were at least as attentive to the work of the scientific travelers who had set out to classify it. This attention served as Darwin's point of entry into Argentine consciousness. His account of his travels became mandatory reading, as Alexander von Humboldt's had been before him. Before the publication of the Origin, Darwin was thus viewed as a traveling naturalist in the tradition of Humboldt, ordering and classifying the New World. This may seem a humble role for a man destined to become the guiding light of a scientific revolution, but as this chapter will show, it was in this guise, as a participant in ongoing scientific exchanges with Argentina, a region of increasing geological and paleontological importance, that Darwin's influence continued to grow.
In terms of scientific discourse before Darwin, as Mary Pratt has explained, Humboldt "remained the single most influential interlocutor in the process of reimagining and redefinition that coincided with Spanish America's independence of Spain" (Pratt 1992, 111). Roberto González Echeverría also mentions the crucial importance that travel narratives, and mainly that of Humboldt, had in the foundation of Latin American nations. The travelers and "their writings became the purveyors of a discourse about Latin American reality that rang true and was enormously influential." The authority of this literature was "immense, not only on political developments within the very reality they described, but on the conception of that reality that individuals within it had of it and of themselves" (González Echeverría 1990, 102). For the generation who fought for independence from Spain all over Spanish America, Humboldt's views were very much the foundation of their modern nations. In 1819 Simón Bolívar delivered his famous speech to the Angostura Congress. In it he expressed the view that, above all else, the new nations needed unity.
To save our incipient republic from ... chaos, all our moral powers will be insufficient, unless we melt the whole people down into one mass; the composition of the government is a whole, the legislation is a whole, and national feeling is a whole. Unity, Unity, Unity, ought to be our device. The blood of our citizens is various, let us mix it to make it one; our constitution has divided authority, let us agree to unite it; our laws are the sad remains of all ancient and modern despotisms. Let the monstrous structure be demolished, let it fall, and, withdrawing from its ruins, let us erect a temple to justice, and, under the auspices of its sacred influence, let us dictate a code of Venezuelan laws. Should we wish to consult records and models of legislation, Great Britain, France, and North America, present us with admirable ones. (Bolívar 1950, 691–92; trans. in Larrazabal 1866, 371)
Bolivar's faith in unity had an important connection with Humboldt's idea on the subject. In Argentina the majority of the intellectuals born around 1810 and later known, collectively, as the Generation of 1837, relied heavily on his interpretation of the relationship between nature, science, and reason and likewise emphasized the importance of unity and harmony. Humboldt's writings made a strong case for the study of these two principles in nature.
Nature considered rationally, that is to say, submitted to the process of thought, is a unity in diversity of phenomena; a harmony, blending together all created things, however dissimilar in form and attributes; one great whole animated by the breath of life. The most important result of a rational inquiry into nature is, therefore, to establish the unity and harmony of this stupendous mass of force and matter, to determine with impartial justice what is due to the discoveries of the past and to those of the present, and to analyze the individual parts of natural phenomena without succumbing beneath the weight of the whole. (1856, 24)
As is clear from this passage, for Humboldt, rational observation was ruled by the role of harmony as expressed in the union of diversity—a view that would become increasingly untenable after the publication of Origin in 1859, when nature became a battlefield of conflict, a place of dispute and competition.
Argentina and the Scientific Exchanges of the 1820s through 1840s
Even in the 1820s and 1830s, interest on the part of members of the more educated Argentine classes in any new idea Europe had to offer ensured that when an important scientist came to visit, his presence would not pass unnoticed. It was precisely the affirmation of the superiority of the Enlightenment ideas and secular values over those of the past that sent many young intellectuals into exile in the 1830s and 1840s. The conflict between Juan Manuel de Rosas, the conservative governor of Buenos Aires who controlled national politics, and the young generation who sought to impose a civilized culture divided Argentina until Rosas's defeat in 1852.
At the same time, and in spite of accusations against Rosas for his neglect of science, Argentina was exporting data of scientific interest. For example, the early 1830s saw the publication of two important works on the Chaco region. In 1832 Pedro de Angelis published his Biografia del Señor General Arenales y juicio sobre la memoria histórica de su segunda campaña a la Sierra del Perú en 1821 (Biography of General Arenales and Analysis of the Historical Record of His Second Campaign to the Sierra of Peru in 1821). This account of the life and career of a prominent general of the War of Independence incorporated information on the 1821 campaign provided by his son José, including cartographic data that would be carefully read in Europe. The following year, José de Arenales (1833) himself published his Noticias históricas y descriptivas sobre el gran país del Chaco y Río Bermejo, con observaciones relativas a un plan de navegación y la colonización que se propone (Historical and Descriptive Notices on the Great Region of the Chaco and the Rio Bermejo, with Observations Concerning a Plan of Navigation and the Proposed Colonization). This work would become a standard reference for published accounts of expeditions in Argentine territory.
Pedro de Angelis was another foreigner who actively participated in the scientific exchanges that took place before the publication of Origin in 1859. He was born in Italy in 1784 and spent his early career as a journalist at home and in France, leaving for Buenos Aires in 1827 with the ostensible aim of enlisting his talents in the service of the liberal government of Bernardino Rivadavia. He later became a collaborator of Rivadavia's enemy Juan Manuel de Rosas, for whom he wrote supportive propaganda and managed historical archives. Following the account of the Chaco expedition, he was instrumental in publishing further historical documents and promoting them abroad. In 1836 he released a collection that included accounts of Luis de la Cruz's trans-Andean expedition of 1801. This book was widely distributed, attracting the notice of the prestigious Edinburgh Review in April 1837, especially for its accounts of the region's peoples and natural environment. "A very circumstantial account of these people [Indians] is given by La Cruz, in a memoir, inserted in the collection of Señor de Angelis.... We shall close ... repeating our persuasion, that its merits entitle it to a European as well as an American popularity; and that it is likely, by concentrating the information which relates to the interior of the American continent, in the vicinity and south of the Rio de la Plata, to direct enterprise and scientific enquiry towards it, and thus to accelerate our acquaintance with that interesting portion of the globe" ("Review of Colección de obras y documentos" 1837, 109).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from From Man to Ape by ADRIANA NOVOA ALEX LEVINE Copyright © 2010 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
Part I
1. The Roots of Evolutionary Thought in Argentina
2. The Reception of Darwinism in Argentina
3. The Triumph of Darwinism in Argentina
Part II
4. The Culture of Extinction
5. Sexual Selection and the Politics of Mating
6. Evolutionary Psychology and Its Analogies
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index