The Comparative Reception of Darwinism: A Brief History

Abstract

The subfield of Darwin studies devoted to comparative reception coalesced around 1971 with the planning of a conference on the subject, at the University of Texas at Austin held in April 1972. The original focus was western Europe, Russia and the United States. Subsequently a spate of studies on the Italian reception added to the Eurocentric focus. The center of activity then switched to Latin America where a group of scholars coalesced in the mid 1990s, seemingly related to the maturation of the history of science as a discrete discipline there somewhat earlier. When interest in Europe revived during the last decade, the center of gravity had moved both eastward, to the former Society bloc countries (a reflection of the institutionalization of the history of science there), and north to Scandinavia. Recently, interest in the topic has emerged in the Islamic World. The subtext of the expansion of this topic is modernization.

Teleological vs. Scientific views of evolution theory among high school biology teachers in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay

“…Darwin's disciple and defender, Huxley (1901), stated: "Among the many problems which came under my consideration, the position of the human species in zoological classification was one of the most serious". Nevertheless, rejection of human evolution has been recorded in Latin America since Darwin proposed it in Europe (Glick, 2010;Medel & Veloso, 2009;Reda, 2016;R Ruiz, 1987;Rosaura Ruiz, 1987;Silva et al, 2021). This rejection has impaired the teaching of evolution, and especially of human evolution.…”