Science Literature

Darwin landed at the port of Bahia, Brazil, on 28 February 1832. Whilst his writings about the natural history of that part of the world have received much attention, "less well known is the effect Darwin had on the people of Latin America". The effect came through intermediaries - people who were inspired by Darwinism to engineer social change.

The first group of leaders was influential from the late 1880s. They were intellectuals and politicians who had already drank from the wells of secularism. They found Darwin's The Descent of Man compelling and were attracted to the eugenics theorising of prominent Darwinians.

"They soaked up the latest ideas from Europe, and read the works of philosophers such as Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin and the inventor of eugenics. Most Latin Americans thought that society, like nature, evolved from primitive to complex structures, and saw the industrial societies of Western Europe as being more culturally sophisticated than their own."

The secularisation of knowledge in biology was Darwin's most significant achievement, but with it came the conviction that human society needs the same mechanisms (image source here)

Turning this into policy, they promoted mass migration from Europe "to 'whiten' and so 'evolve' their people". They "argued that 'whitening' their nations' stock through interbreeding was the only path to societal improvement". The result was spectacular: more than 11 million immigrants came from Britain, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain. These people were encouraged to become land owners and to develop leadership roles.

"By 1900, people of European origin dominated society in Argentina and Uruguay. [. . .] European ideas and values spread across Latin America at the expense of Amerindian and African American ones, with the establishment of European-style cities and institutions."

The ideology pendulum swung away from this when the European continent disintegrated in World War I, followed some years after by economic turmoil.

"The death toll of the First World War demonstrated that Europeans had not evolved into superior human beings. A decade later, the Great Depression swept away the export economies underlying modernization in Argentina at least as much as it did in Mexico and Peru, belying the notion that the whitening of the population would lead to permanent social progress."

The intellectuals were still evolutionists at heart, but now it was the Lamarckian sympathies of Darwin that came to the fore.

[These leaders] "followed the 'soft inheritance' notion of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and countered that people's inheritable traits could be changed simply by altering their environment, including their education, diet and living conditions."

These voices came from the "cultural nationalists" who championed the idea of multicultural integration via literacy campaigns with a policy of racial and ethnic blending.

"Although Darwin wasn't specifically invoked in such theories, his body of thought was still influential; so much so that the cultural nationalists might today be described as having adopted their own brand of social Darwinism."

Then came World War II which "dealt a serious blow to notions of human history as a progressive process". Gradual evolutionary change was discarded and the intelligentsia embraced "social revolution as the solution to the region's problems". Although the author of the essay does not link this ideological shift to Darwinism, many communist leaders are known to have looked very favourably on Darwinian concepts. Instead of gradualism, they chose to emphasise survival of the fittest in an amoral world.

Latin America provides us with numerous examples of people taking Darwinian concepts and applying them to the social and political arena. Darwin himself did this in The Descent of Man and his followers have developed these ideas in ways that seem paradoxical today. Some promoted scientific racism and eugenics, whereas others worked for multicultural integration. Some justified capitalism whereas others advocated socialism. Some built their thoughts around gradualism and progress, yet others used survival of the fittest to engineer extinction and social revolution. There is enough in the history of Latin America to make anyone first question and then abandon the principles of Social Darwinism - yet even today there seem to be plenty of scholars who continue to think there is no alternative but to pursue Social Darwinism as the route for structuring social and political philosophy.

"Throughout, Latin America political thinkers shared an optimistic belief that these societies could and would 'evolve' in a positive direction - whatever that direction might be."

Some reflections on these historical developments seem justified.
First, there is an extraordinary malleability in the way Social Darwinism has been expressed. If there is the will, almost every social practice can be given the appearance of scientific respectability. What we do not see are the distinctive characteristics of science: of hypothesis testing, falsification, and the development of theory that can be used to make predictions.
Second, the concept of 'progress', when linked to Darwinism, is a clear indication that there has been an injection of human aspiration. As Darwin conceived his theory, there is no goal (or even a purposeful direction). The evolutionary process is a consequence of Law and Chance, neither of which give support to the "optimistic belief" of politicians about evolving their societies in a "positive direction". These politicians were seeking a place for Design within a theoretical framework that is incompatible with the concept of design. This superimposition of a Design layer on a Law+Chance system has become so widespread that one wonders how intellectuals can live with the incompatibility problem! If the exclusion of Design from evolutionary theory were more widely recognised, would Darwinian ideology be as popular as it appears to be?
This brings us to the third reflection - on subliminal Darwinism. Like the cultural nationalists, many people adopt Darwinism without being conscious of the source of their thinking. They have imbibed a worldview from their peers - without thinking it through for themselves. They are oblivious to the idea that Darwinism is a theory built upon a particular worldview and not just a science of origins. The long-term consequence of this should be cause for concern. Humans are creative, have values affecting behaviour, have a sense of justice and have aspirations. None of these characteristics fit harmoniously with a worldview that is made up of blind, unguided and stochastic processes. That is why many of us are disturbed by attempts to expand the exposure of children to Darwinism in primary school education. Whilst this may be defended by appeals to science, it does little to assuage concerns that what children will get is subliminal indoctrination in a Darwinian worldview.

Global Darwin: Multicultural mergers
Jurgen Buchenau
Nature, 462, 284-285 (19 November 2009) | doi:10.1038/462284a

Abstract: Latin Americans first saw evolution as a reason to 'whiten' their societies, then as a reason to take pride in their mixed lineage, says Jurgen Buchenau in the last of four pieces on Darwin's global influence.

See also:

The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940, Edited and with an introduction by Richard Graham, with chapters by Thomas E. Skidmore, Aline Helg, and Alan Knight. University of Texas Press, 1990.

Excerpt from Introduction:

Initiated in Europe, the classification and ranking of humankind into inferior and superior races profoundly influenced the development, indeed, the very creation of the sciences. Biology, medicine, psychology, anthropology, ethnology, and sociology were all to some degree shaped by an evolutionary paradigm. The spread of European colonialism and the rapid growth of the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century brought additional and supposedly irrefutable proof of the validity of a scheme that placed the so-called primitive African or Indian at the bottom of the scale and at its top the "civilized" white European. Many social policies regarding education, crime, health, and immigration were informed by these dominant racial theories. Although the racialist conception of human beings began to lose its credibility from the early twentieth century, it was not until the Nazis began to apply those concepts to eugenics and to undertake massive extermination of the "inferior" races that most scientists firmly denounced the, by then, pseudo-scientific character of racial theories.

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