1. www.nature.com/nature
Vol 461 | Issue no. 7268 | 29 October 2009
Gene therapy deserves a fresh chance
Initial interest in gene therapy waned after the technology failed to live up to expectation. Progress made
since has received little attention, but suggests that the pervading sense of disillusionment is misplaced.
n the early 1990s, when the first human trials got under way, it
seemed to many that the era of gene therapy was at hand: the techniques of modern molecular biotechnology would make it possible to repair genetic defects by inserting healthy DNA directly
into a patient’s cells. The excitement was short-lived. Lasting effects
proved difficult to obtain in early trials, and the community quickly
grew sceptical. Then, in 2003, when it was announced that several
gene-therapy patients in a Paris-based clinical trial had developed leukaemia, and that one of them had died, the mood became
bleak. Subsequent reports of successful and effective gene-therapy
trials have done little to lift the prevailing sense of doom. For most
researchers, gene therapy now seems like a dead end.
But it doesn’t have to be a dead end — not if scientists shift their
perspective on the risks of gene therapy to be more in line with that
of clinicians.
Scientists are trained to focus on understanding the systems that
they study in great detail. And when they devise therapeutic interventions — for example, harnessing a viral shell to insert a therapeutic
gene into a patient’s DNA — they naturally want those systems to
be engineered with equally great care, and for them to be as near to
risk-free perfection as possible.
Clinicians, by contrast, care for real patients in real time, which
makes treatment decisions a matter of pragmatism. How do the
risks stack up against the benefits for each available alternative
— given that the risks are never zero? Clinicians are certainly not
cavalier about their patients’ well-being, but they may well end up
prescribing a therapy that has a poorly understood mechanism and
potentially large side effects because it gives the patient the best
odds of recovery or survival. If they — and patients — had shied
away from such dangers in the past, life-saving interventions such
as organ grafts and bone-marrow transplants might never have
been developed.
From that perspective, the fact that, collectively, the Paris trial
and others carried out since have produced positive results in some
20 patients out of a total of two dozen looms at least as large as the
handful of leukaemia cases. To clinicians, such results suggest a treatment that is risky, but potentially life-saving — a new option for people for whom there are no alternatives.
However, this was not the view that prevailed. When the viral
delivery vehicle itself turned out to be
responsible for the leukaemia cases in “The results suggest
the Paris trial, scientists deemed the a treatment that is
trial a failure. Bad press ensued, pro- risky, but potentially
posals for gene-therapy clinical tri- life-saving.”
als came under increased regulatory
scrutiny and standards for demonstrating safety were set higher
than for other approaches. Unsurprisingly in such a climate, the
biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries gradually dropped
out of the gene-therapy pursuit. This corporate disinterest slowed
clinical progress: academic centres are ill-equipped to make genetherapy vectors of clinical grade and scale, and research funding is
typically insufficient to support clinical trials. More insidiously, it
has become harder to recruit young talent to a field that is perceived
as falling short of its promises.
To reverse this trend, it is time for researchers and industry to
refresh their perspective on gene therapy and to consider its successes with as much intensity as its setbacks. The focus on adverse
events has had positive consequences: researchers dissected the exact
molecular mechanisms that led to cancer, designed better vectors,
devised animal models to test these vectors and developed sophisticated assays for monitoring patients. As a result, both scientists
and clinicians now have a battery of extraordinarily refined tools
for preclinical and clinical studies of gene therapy. The field is ripe
for further successes.
■
Darwin and culture
there is encouraging evidence that probabilistic reasoning can be
improved by targeted education early in life (see page 1189).
Even more crucial, however, are the effects of the cultural lens. Over
the coming month, Nature’s Opinion pages will explore particularly
vivid examples of these effects in the world’s widely divergent reactions to Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolution in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries (see page 1200).
In England, for example, the Church reacted badly to Darwin’s
theory, going so far as to say that to believe it was to imperil your soul.
But the notion that Darwin’s ideas ‘killed’ God and were a threat to
religion was by no means the universal response in the nineteenth
century.
Darwin’s theory reached the world at a time when many people were
looking for explanations for social, political and racial inequalities,
I
A new series of essays traces the astounding
variety of reactions to the theory of evolution.
he public reception of scientific ideas depends largely on two
factors: people’s ability to grasp factual information and the
cultural lens through which that information is filtered. The
former is what scientists tend to focus on when they give popular
accounts of issues such as climate change. The assumption is that
if they explain things very, very clearly, everyone will understand.
Unfortunately, this is an uphill battle. The general public’s average
capacity to weigh facts and numbers is notoriously poor — although
T
© 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
1173

2. EDITORIALS
NATURE|Vol 461|29 October 2009
and in many parts of the world were wondering how to improve their
lot in the face of Europe’s global imperialism. So from Egypt to India,
China and Japan, many religious scholars embraced Darwin’s ideas,
often showing how their own schools of thought had anticipated the
notion of evolution. Against the threat of Western imperialism and
Western charges of ‘backwardness’, it was to their advantage to highlight the rationality of their creed.
In China, Darwin’s ideas were seen as supporting Confucians’ belief
in the perfectibility of the cosmic order. Evolutionary theory also
became fodder for political movements of revolution and reform,
and eventually laid the groundwork for communism. Latin American
politicians initially reacted to Darwin’s ideas by attempting to entice
white Europeans to emigrate and intermarry with local populations,
believing that this would ‘improve the stock’. But after two world
wars had made European culture look less impressive, Latin America
began to see its racial diversity as an advantage, and moved towards a
social view that favoured a homogeneous blend of cultures.
In nineteenth-century Russia, meanwhile, a tendency to distrust
rabid, dog-eat-dog capitalism helped incline naturalists away from
a view of evolution that emphasized competition between species.
Instead they embraced a ‘theory of mutual aid’, an account that
focused on the role of cooperation in ensuring survival in a harsh
environment.
The lesson for today’s scientists and policy-makers is simple: they
cannot assume that a public presented with ‘the facts’ will come to
the same conclusion as themselves. They must take value systems,
cultural backdrops and local knowledge gaps into account and frame
their arguments accordingly. Such approaches will be crucial in facing
current global challenges, from recessions to pandemics and climate
change. These issues will be perceived and dealt with differently by
different nations — not because they misunderstand, but because
their understanding is in part locally dependent.
Darwin once said: “But then with me the horrid doubt always arises
whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed
from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.” Researchers and policy-makers would do well to mimic
his humility when presenting science, and remember how people’s
minds truly work.
■
Mind the spin
the vaccine itself was of no immediate public-health utility. At the
same time, however, they hammered home the message that this
was “the first time an HIV vaccine has successfully prevented HIV
infection in humans”, and implied that the event was somehow
historic. Such statements, together with the selective initial
presentation of the data, are well outside the scientific norms for
presenting the results of clinical trials. They inevitably create suspicion that the trial sponsors may have put an excessively positive spin
on results that are far from clear-cut,
in a trial that has long been contro- “The trial sponsors
versial (T. V. Padma Nature Med. 10, argue that announcing
1267; 2004). The trial has also been the less-upbeat
six years in the works, and so there
analyses along with
seems no particular public-health
urgency to justify publication by press the positive result
would have been too
conference.
Fortunately, such stories are still complicated for the
rare in science. Witness the way sci- public to understand.”
entists have behaved since the beginning of the current H1N1 flu pandemic, in which the urgent threat
to health creates legitimate tensions between getting results out fast
and respecting peer review. Most researchers have negotiated this
tension well, through a combination of fast-track publication by
journals and online pre-publication sharing of preliminary data —
but not through hyping their results.
Yet the temptation for scientists and their institutions to spin their
research to the media, or to go publicity-mongering, is always there.
And — as illustrated by the excessive public-relations campaign surrounding Ida, a fossil presented as a missing link in human evolution
(see Nature 459, 484; 2009 and 461, 1040; 2009) — too many in the
media will buy into the initial hype.
Such behaviour is corrosive to the process of scholarly scientific
communication. Research institutions must not allow it to become
the norm.
■
Scientists — and their institutions — should resist
the ever-present temptation to hype their results.
he circumstances surrounding the recent announcement of
results from an HIV vaccine trial in Thailand are troubling.
The sponsors of the US$119-million phase III clinical trial, a
consortium led by the US Army, the National Institutes of Health and
the Thai government, announced on 24 September that the trial had
been a success: an analysis of the data showed that the vaccine had a
statistically significant effect on preventing infection.
Other scientists could not immediately assess that claim, however:
the full data from the trial were not made available until 20 October,
when they were presented at an AIDS vaccine conference in Paris
and in an article published online the same day (S. Rerks-Ngarm
et al. N. Engl. J. Med. doi:10.1056/nejmoa0908492; 2009). The article contained two other data analyses, not mentioned in the initial
announcement, showing smaller effects that were not statistically
significant (see page 1187).
The trial’s sponsors defend the premature announcement on the
grounds that they had promised to inform the Thai people of the
results first; 24 September is also Mahidol Day, the anniversary of
the death of the king’s father and a day of national observance in
Thailand. The sponsors also argue that announcing the less-upbeat
analyses along with the positive result would have been too complicated for the public to understand; they wanted to quickly deliver
a clear-cut message on the trial’s findings. Making the full data
immediately available to scientists on 24 September would also have
been impossible, they add, because of the conference and journal
embargoes.
To their credit, the scientists involved did emphasize in their
public statements that any vaccine effect was “modest”, and that
T
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© 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved

3. Vol 461|29 October 2009
OPINION
Global Darwin: Eastern enchantment
People from Egypt to Japan used Darwin’s ideas to reinvent and reignite their core philosophies and religions,
says Marwa Elshakry in the first of four weekly pieces on how evolution was received around the world.
o other nineteenth-century
scientist possessed Charles Darwin’s global renown. Between
the appearance of On the Origin of
Species in 1859 and The Descent of
Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
some 12 years later, his works were
discussed in scores of languages. Darwin noted
in his autobiography, published in 1887, that the
theory was debated as far afield as Japan, and
added with some surprise that he’d even seen an
essay on the Origin in Hebrew showing that “the
theory is contained in the Old Testament!”
His worldwide fame was, in part, thanks to
technology. The first telegraphic cables were
laid across the Atlantic Ocean floor around the
time the Origin was published, and the next
two decades saw Europe connected in the same
way to India, China and Australasia. Meanwhile, mechanical advances in paper making
and printing helped to move ideas across the
globe at record speeds.
Yet the main reason for the worldwide success
of Darwin’s ideas was the ease with which they
were assimilated into local traditions of thought
— as the example of the Jewish attempt to
reconcile science with scripture hints. Although
Darwin himself may have found such reconciliation surprising, it was certainly not as
unusual as he might have imagined. Scholars
from Calcutta to Tokyo and Beijing constructed
their own lineage for the theory of evolution by
natural selection, tracing it to older and more
familiar schools of thought and claiming ownership of what they saw as the precursors to these
ideas. Although some, particularly in Europe,
saw Darwin as a weapon beating down religious
beliefs, around the world he was as much a force
for religious resurgence and revivification as for
religious scepticism. Even nineteenth-century
Muslim thinkers reconciled Darwinian ideas
with their own past religious and philosophical
texts; which may seem ironic, given the rise of
Muslim creationists today.
N
Cosmic order
Take as one example the work of Chinese
scholar Yan Fu. In the late 1890s, Yan published a popular translation of Thomas
Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics in which he
reinterpreted both Huxley and Darwin in the
light of Confucian ethical debates.
Huxley, one of Darwin’s most vocal
1200
supporters, had argued that humans Muslim writings from the tenth and eleventh
acted against the natural order of centuries referred to a hierarchy of beings,
things when putting the interests from minerals to flora and fauna, and even
of others above themselves. But for argued that apes were lower forms of humans
Yan, this gloomy view of nature ran — more evidence for nineteenth-century Muscounter to what he understood to be lims that Darwin’s theory was ‘nothing new’.
Darwin’s — and Confucius’s — belief
in the perfectibility of the cosmic order. Echo- Empire and evolution
ing older Confucian ethical debates while One of the driving forces behind many of
drawing on his own reading of Darwin and these scholars’ work was a desire to push back
other Victorian naturalists, Yan argued that against the forces of Western imperialism. At
selfishness and selflessness were part of the the height of European imperial power, claims
natural order, and that each has its place in about white superiority were widespread. In
the journey towards an ideal state: the key is response, defenders of non-Western faiths
to achieve the right balance between the two. drew attention to the greater rationality of
This was how Darwin effectively gave Yan, and their creeds to defend themselves against
many of Yan’s readers, new licence to endorse Western charges of backwardness and superone of Confucianism’s ethical prescriptions.
stition. Many were keen to show that their
Darwin’s ideas were similarly used by late- traditions, unlike those of Western Europe,
nineteenth-century Bengali intelligentsia to accepted, reinforced or had even anticipated
support long-standing Hindu cosmological the findings of modern science. By embracing
beliefs. Some of these thinkers wrote of how Darwin’s ideas, they emphasized that Christimodern theories of positivism (the idea that anity alone was in conflict with science.
true knowledge is that based on verifiable
Muhammad Abduh, the Grand Mufti of
sensory experience) and evolutionism had ech- Egypt, for instance, was worried about the
inroads that missionaries had made into the
oes in Hindu theories of creation.
For example, Satish Mukherjee, a leading educational system of the Muslim Ottoman
member of the Indian Positivist Society, saw lands. He was also tired of critics pointing to
Samkhya, one of the oldest schools of Hindu Islam’s supposed inability to accommodate
philosophy, as a precursor to the modern modern pedagogy and science. In Science and
view of evolution. Under Samkhya, the world Civilization in Christianity and Islam (1902),
unfolds as a result of a continual cycle between Abduh argued that, in contrast to Christianity,
creation and dissolution:
Islam was free of the conflict with science that had
consciousness, self or
“By embracing Darwin’s
spirit becomes realized in
ideas, they emphasized that so violently plagued Chrismatter and then separated
tian civilization in Europe.
Christianity alone was in
from it, and so on. These
To stress this difference, he
cycles are seen to account
repeatedly wove references
conflict with science.”
for the creation of species
to Darwin and evolution
as well as for the evolution of different stages into lectures on the exegesis of the Koran.
of the Universe. For Mukherjee, as for many
Although many used Darwin to highlight
later Indian thinkers, Samkhya was therefore the glory of their founding civilizations, they
the theory of evolution applied to the entire also co-opted his theory to explain their falling
cosmos.
behind the Western world in modern times. It
Muslim readers found their heritage in was seen as a way to explain both the rise of the
Darwin’s theory too. Supporters and crit- West’s technological and imperial superiority
ics pointed out that Muslim philosophers in the present, and the path to success for the
had long referred to the idea that species or rest of the world in the future.
‘kinds’, as the Arabic term anwa‘ suggests,
At the height of the scramble for Africa in
could change over time. For this reason the 1899, for instance, the Egyptian intellectual
great classics of early Muslim philosophy and and women’s-rights advocate Qasim Amin
cosmology were almost always cited whenever warned that “Western civilization, speeded
Darwin was discussed in Arabic, Farsi or Urdu. by steam and electricity, is advancing and
© 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved

4. has expanded from its origins to all parts of
the earth”. The weak, he warned, would be
unable to survive the onslaught. For civil servant Amin, this meant that social reform was
needed. ‘Self-strengthening’ state reformers
in Korea and Indian nationalists in the early
twentieth century felt much the same way, and
they too turned to evolution’s advocates for
instruction while pushing key governmental
reforms. Of course, the battle cry of intellectuals was not always heeded.
In promoting political ‘evolution’, most of
Darwin’s proponents outside Europe subscribed not to revolution, but to change of a
very gradual sort, mimicking the step-by-step
slow change of natural selection.
Hiroyuki Kato, an instructor of law at the
Tokyo Imperial University, used Darwin’s
theory to defend Japan’s imperial rule at the
beginning of the twentieth century. At that
time, a rise of democratic movements was
challenging the power of the Emperor Meiji.
Kato, who also gave weekly lectures to the
Emperor on constitutional and international
law, supported a strongly centralized imperial
line of rule. He found in Darwinism a new language in which to dress his arguments and a
scientific explanation for why radical change
wasn’t the answer to Japan’s problems.
Kato reinterpreted Darwin’s ‘struggle for life’
as a slow, steady ‘struggle for ethics’. The ethic
he favoured could be counted as part of the
samurai principle of self-sacrifice, which in
this case he took to mean absolute allegiance
to the Emperor above all other commitments.
Just as through death the samurai was said
to become the perfect winner, so the ultimate victor in the struggle for ethics was the
martyr dying for the sake of something bigger.
This demonstrates another characteristic
common to non-European responses to Darwinism: the real question most saw lurking
behind the theory of evolution was whether one
could draw a moral code from nature. For Kato
as for so many others, mere survival was not
enough to comprise a true ethics — evolutionary or otherwise. There had to be something
beyond life to give life itself a purpose. As Muslim reformer Muhammad Iqbal later put it, the
main problem with Darwin’s view of evolution
was that it gave death ‘no constructive meaning’. Perhaps for this reason, many attached
their own meanings and linked Darwin to longstanding ethical systems of their own.
Paragon of scepticism?
If the ease with which Darwin’s ideas were
assimilated into local traditions of thought
is little known today, it is because much of
the discussion about Darwin in the West has
focused on the supposed clash between his
theory of evolution and Christianity. Certainly, ever since 1859, Darwin’s name has been
invoked by supporters of the forces of science
in their battle against religion, and the image
of Darwin as a paragon of religious scepticism
has helped him to become an enduring icon of
the modern sciences.
Darwin’s theory did indeed help to sharpen
the sense of a boundary between ideas of
science and of religious faith. For disciples
such as Huxley, Darwin’s empirical approach
offered a way to distinguish knowledge from
belief, or fact from fiction. The Church of England, along with many other establishments,
fought back: bishops preached that to believe
© 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
Darwin was to risk endangering one’s soul.
Yet in truth, things were never this simple.
Darwin was indefinite and at times inconsistent on the question of religion in his own
writings. He famously left the ultimate origin of
species ambiguous in the last line of the Origin
— speaking of the power of life as ‘originally
breathed’ into one or several forms, deploying a
key Christian metaphor for creation — and he
often conveyed himself as an agnostic in his letters. Not all Christians recoiled from Darwin’s
ideas; some Protestants and Catholics believed
that they too could reconcile their doctrines
with his theory and were spurred to revisit
their own interpretation of scripture.
Then, as now, Darwin meant different things
to different people. Globally, he was not so much
a revolutionary or a scourge of faiths, as he was
a revivifier of traditions. He straddled worlds
between the moderns and the ancients, giving a
new lease of life to ancient philosophers, ethical
debates and even dynastic loyalties.
In an age in which advocates of intelligent
design battle to have evolution removed from
classrooms, we would do well to recall how
Darwin once captured and captivated the
world — not by ridding it of the forces of
enchantment, faith or even God, but by revitalizing traditions of belief and re-enchanting
so many.
■
Marwa Elshakry is associate professor of history
at Columbia University, 611 Fayerweather Hall,
New York, New York 10027, USA, and is the
author of the forthcoming Reading Darwin in the
Middle East (University of Chicago Press).
See Editorial, page 1173. Further reading
accompanies this article online. For more on
Darwin see www.nature.com/darwin
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ILLUSTRATION BY G. LAM
OPINION
NATURE|Vol 461|29 October 2009

5. Vol 462|5 November 2009
OPINION
Global Darwin: Contempt for competition
Darwin’s idea of the ‘struggle for existence’ struck a chord with his fellow countrymen. But Russians rejected
the alien metaphor, says Daniel Todes, in the second of four weekly pieces on reactions to evolutionary theory.
n On the Origin of Species, Charles
would lead them to reject Darwin’s
Malthusian metaphor. This in turn
Darwin acknowledged his intellecaffected a wide range of research —
tual debt to the Reverend Thomas
Robert Malthus. That debt had radifrom studies of the mutual aid among
cally different consequences for his
migrating fish to a Nobel prizewinning theory of inflammation and
British and Russian readers.
immunity — and echoed well into
In An Essay on the Principle of
Population, as it Affects the Future Improve- the twentieth century, perhaps even playing a
ment of Society (1798), Malthus argued against part in the enthronement of Lysenkoism. This
believers in social progress by citing an inexo- Russian response provides a striking examrable natural law: population tends to increase ple of the way in which metaphors — and the
geometrically and food supply only arithmeti- experiences and cultural traditions that they
cally. These imbalanced progressions lead to a capture — shape scientific thought.
“struggle for existence” in which the winners
The experiences of leading Russian natuprospered and the losers suffered privation ralists were in many ways opposite to those of
and premature death. Nature itself decreed Darwin and his fellow proposer of evolution
that human misery was inevitable.
by natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace.
By Darwin’s day, Malthus’s theory had The two men shared seminal field experiences
entered the mainstream of British thought. in densely populated tropical environments.
Pondering possible mechanisms of evolution The contest between organisms seemed
in 1838, the 29-year-old Darwin picked up obvious there. Most Russian naturalists, by
Malthus’s essay. Never a full-throated Malthu- contrast, investigated a vast under-populated
sian in his political attitudes, he nevertheless continental plain. For them, nature was not an
adapted Malthus’s idea to his science. “As “entangled bank” — the image Darwin took
more individuals are produced than can pos- from the Brazilian jungle. It was a largely empty
sibly survive,” he explained in On the Origin Siberian expanse in which overpopulation was
of Species (1859), “there must in every case be rare and only the struggle of organisms against
a struggle for existence, either one individual a harsh environment was dramatic.
with another of the same species, or with the
individuals of distinct species, or with the Cultural divide
physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine Russia’s economy, political structure and culture
of Malthus applied with manifold force to the also contrasted sharply with those in the United
whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.”
Kingdom. Capitalism was only weakly develDarwin recognized that he was using the oped and political supporters of the two most
term “struggle for existence in a large and important classes, rich landlords and peasants,
metaphorical sense” to encompass a variety spoke the language of communalism — stressof natural relations that one wouldn’t neces- ing not individual initiative and struggle, but the
sarily conceive of as a battle: not just two dogs importance of cooperation within social groups
fighting over a scrap of
and the virtues of social
food, but also a plant seekharmony. Russian political
“In the Siberian expanse,
ing moisture in the desert,
commentators of the left,
only the struggle of
right and centre reviled
or the dependence of one
organisms against a harsh
being on another.
Malthus as an apologist for
For Darwin and other
environment was dramatic.” predatory capitalism and
leading British evolutionsoulless individualism.
ists, this appealed to common sense. Living
The cultural gulf between the two lands was
on a crowded island with a capitalist economy captured by demographer and biologist Nikolai
and highly individualist culture, struggle for Danilevskii’s summary of the British character
existence did not seem a metaphor at all, but, in his book Russia and Europe (1869). The typirather, a simple and eloquent description of cal Englishman, he wrote, “accepts [struggle]
with all its consequences, demands it as his
nature and society.
Russians, however, lived in a very different right, tolerates no limits upon it”. In his two volland. Their own cultural values and experiences umes on Darwinism (1885, 1889), he catalogued
I
36
© 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
the lengths to which the English went to indulge
their passion for individualistic conflict. They
boxed one-on-one (not in groups, as Russians
liked to spar), founded debating societies for
the “struggle of opinions”, and even established
mountain-climbing clubs, not for scholarly
purposes, “but solely to allow oneself the
satisfaction of overcoming difficulties and
dangers … in competition with others”.
Small wonder, then, that few Russians shared
Darwin and Wallace’s respect for Malthus, and
that many saw the struggle for existence as an
infusion of the British enthusiasm for individualistic competition into natural science.
Darwin’s theory, as Danilevskii put it, was
“a purely English doctrine”.
Most Russian naturalists, many of whom
were evolutionists before 1859, shared that
view. Yet they also admired Darwin and didn’t
think his association with Malthus justified
complete rejection of his theory. Their common response was to break down Darwin’s
Malthusian metaphor into its component
parts, to explore their relationship and relative
importance in nature and to conclude that he
had greatly exaggerated the role of the two
parts most closely associated with Malthus:
overpopulation as the generator of conflict,
and intraspecific competition as its result.
This common response defined a general
direction, but individual scientists took different
paths. Russia’s leading botanist, Andrei Beketov,
concluded that intraspecific struggle was a minor
note within the general “harmony of nature”.
Devaluing natural selection, he reaffirmed
his long-standing view that evolution resulted
chiefly from the direct action of the environment on organisms. Botanical geographer Sergei
Korzhinskii was led to his ‘theory of heterogenesis’ — the idea that mutations create large, step
changes that could yield new species in a single
move. This theory, he emphasized, offered
the great advantage of denying any creative
evolutionary role to the struggle for existence,
which he thought merely pruned the rich tree
of nature. Zoologist Ilya Mechnikov emphasized interspecific struggle. This proved crucial
to his development of the ‘phagocytic theory
of inflammation and immunity’, for which
he received a share of a Nobel prize in 1908.
The critique of Darwin’s metaphor led many
Russian naturalists to the theory of mutual
aid, which emphasized the importance of

6. OPINION
ILLUSTRATION BY G. LAM
NATURE|Vol 462|5 November 2009
cooperation. Darwin too had called attention
to such cooperation, but the theory of mutual
aid went further. It held that the central aspect
of the struggle for existence is an organism’s
struggle with abiotic conditions, that organisms join forces in this struggle, that such
mutual aid is favoured by natural selection,
and that cooperation so vitiated intraspecific
competition as to render it unimportant in
the origin of new species. Often voiced in
the 1860s and 1870s by lay intellectuals and
scientists of every political stripe, this view
was first systematized by St Petersburg University’s ichthyologist Karl Kessler, whose oral
presentation On the Law of Mutual Aid (1879)
transformed this widespread sentiment into a
staple of Russian evolutionary thought.
Anarchistic association
Westerners, however, soon came to associate
this view with one of Kessler’s admirers, the
exiled anarchist prince Peter Kropotkin. In a
mirror image of the Russian response to Darwin’s invocation of Malthus, western Europeans
often dismissed the theory of mutual aid as a
simplistic expression of Kropotkin’s anarchism.
Yet Kropotkin’s critique of Darwin’s Malthusianism had originated in 1862–67, long before
he became a committed anarchist. He had travelled through Siberia with a series of military
and commercial expeditions, traversing more
than 80,000 kilometres in the same role of
gentleman-observer that had taken Darwin,
decades earlier, to the tropics. Already an evolutionist, Kropotkin read Origin in the Siberian
wilderness, and found the emphasis on overpopulation and intraspecific competition
unconvincing. As an exile in England years later,
an appalled Kropotkin read Huxley’s “atrocious
article” on The Struggle for Existence in Human
Society (1888). His responses, brought together
in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902),
reflected the basic logic of the Russian national
style, just as Huxley’s essay reflected that of his
own homeland.
The struggle for existence remained a
preoccupation for Russian evolutionists well
into the 1920s and 1930s. Among them was
Georgii Gause, who developed the ‘competitive exclusion principle’ (which held that no two
species could share the same ecological niche in
a stable environment). His laboratory experiments and mathematical analyses confirmed
the importance of intraspecific competition,
contrary to the traditional Russian consensus.
In 1948, Joseph Stalin himself encouraged
Trofim Lysenko to add an extensive critique
of Darwin’s “Malthusian error” to Lysenko’s
landmark speech about his own ‘creative’
Darwinism. As a young revolutionary at
the turn of the century, Stalin had read Darwin and taken an interest in evolutionary
theory. Lysenko’s doctrine, which was forcibly imposed on Soviet biology from 1948 to
1964 by Stalin and his minions, endorsed the
Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics, rejected the gene as a material unit of
heredity, and denied the evolutionary role of
overpopulation and intraspecific competition.
The long-standing Russian critique of Darwin’s
Malthusianism did not cause Lysenkoism,
but it seems possible that, by influencing
Stalin, it contributed to this tragedy.
A different metaphor caused Darwin problems in his native land. Wallace remarked, in
his article Mr. Darwin’s Metaphors Liable to
© 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
Misconception (1868), that the Malthusian
progressions and struggle for existence were
self-evident “facts”. Yet because natural selection
seemed to personify a perceptive and forwardthinking selector, or god, he urged Darwin to
replace the term with “survival of the fittest”.
Darwin, however, had brushed him off.
“Every one knows what is meant and is implied
by such metaphorical expressions,” he had
demurred. “And they are almost necessary for
brevity.”
On this point Darwin was surely mistaken.
Metaphors are brief, but they are fruitful and
powerful precisely because they are not clear.
They propose open-ended associations that
acquire specific meaning only in the mind of
individuals who consider for themselves, based
on their experiences, how precisely existence is
a ‘struggle’, an animal is a ‘machine’ or DNA a
‘code’. Those associations and meanings often
have a cultural component.
Researchers bring their life experiences and
culture with them into the field and laboratory, and in the course of their investigations
actively originate, interpret, develop and reject
metaphorical pathways. As is shown by the
reception of Darwin’s theory in Russia, the
deployment and criticism of metaphors are
part of the ineffably human process by which
scientists mobilize their experiences and values
to explore the infinite complexity of nature. ■
Daniel Todes is at the Institute of the History of
Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, 1900 East
Monument Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21205, USA.
He is currently completing a biography of Ivan Pavlov.
e-mail: dtodes@jhmi.edu
For further reading, see go.nature.com/c8Abz5
For more on Darwin see www.nature.com/darwin
37

7. Vol 462|12 November 2009
OPINION
Global Darwin: Revolutionary road
In China, under the threat of Western imperialism, interpretations of Darwin’s ideas paved the way for
Marx, Lenin and Mao, argues James Pusey in the third in our series on reactions to evolutionary theory.
harles Darwin’s banner was
first unfurled in China during the Reform Movement
of 1895–98, in response to China’s
defeat in the Sino–Japanese War.
This had been the most crushing
moment in what the Chinese call
their century of humiliation, during which
the Manchu Qing Dynasty barely survived five
great rebellions, and lost four wars against foreign imperialists: Britain, Britain and France,
France, and — most galling of all — Japan.
This last defeat was the most frightening, not
because the Chinese feared ‘puny Japan’, as they
often called it, but because they feared that the
European powers, emboldened by this demonstration of weakness, would “carve up the
Chinese melon” into colonies.
The watchword of the reform movement
was ‘bianfa’, meaning ‘change our institutions’. But the very word ‘change’ was
anathema to the conservative officialdom of
China. So reformers turned to Darwin as a
foreign authority on change, presenting him
not first and foremost as a natural scientist
who had discovered an amazing fact of life,
but as a political scientist who had discovered a cosmic imperative for change.
Meanwhile, the Europeans waved Darwin’s
banner to justify imperialism. Dubbing themselves ‘the fit’, they declared their right to rule
the ‘unfit’. And some Chinese accepted this
argument. Liang Qichao, one of the leading reformers, said in 1898: “If a country can
strengthen itself and make itself one of the fittest, then, even if it annihilates the unfit and
the weak, it can still not be said to be immoral.
Why? Because it is a law of evolution.”
The reformers had to find hope in On the
Origin of Species. And they did, but their most
optimistic interpretations were based on a
handful of mistranslations, themselves based
on a series of misunderstandings. (Westerners
leapt to these misunderstandings as well —
without the benefit of mistranslations.)
Chinese readings of Darwin inspired two
groups — reformers and revolutionaries — to
attempt to change their society through different means. Ultimately, after the failure of
both groups and an erosion of traditional philosophies, Chinese Darwinian thinking prepared the nation for the rhetoric of Karl Marx,
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Mao Zedong.
C
162
T h e m an w ho i nt ro du c e d or natural laws were perfecting mankind and
Darwinian evolution to the reform- human society — eventually led to racist or
ers of 1895 was Yan Fu. Yan had class philosophies that killed people.
graduated from the naval academy
at Fuzhou, and was sent to England Natural law
in 1877 for further study of the naval At the start of the reform movement, the
arts, which patriots hoped would promise of Darwinian progress (which was not
one day help drive European imperialists out really Darwinian) seemed to hold the key to
of the China Sea. But in England, Yan discov- China’s salvation. China was in the monarchy
ered political philosophy, which he came to stage and should hence move on to the constithink of as the true secret of Britain’s ‘fitness’. tutional monarchy stage. The fittest nation on
He returned to China in 1879 with a bundle of Earth, Great Britain, had shown the way.
books, by Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, DarYan wanted democracy for China — even
win and others, that he thought could rescue anarchic democracy, without presidential rule.
China from extinction. He meant to translate In Whence Strength? his call for reform was
them, but did not publish anything for about revolutionary: “Establish a parliament at the
15 years, when goaded into action by the insult capital and let each province and county elect
and injury of the war with Japan.
its own officials.” But ‘Darwin’ held him back
In 1895 Yan published his first essay, from real revolution. Yan believed that step-byWhence Strength?, soon followed by a brilliant, step progress was a fixed natural law, so stages
periphrastic translation of Thomas Huxley’s had to be taken in order. America had skipped
Evolution and Ethics, which Yan wrote in such constitutional monarchy and gone straight to
elegant classical Chinese that even conserva- democracy, but a resulting class war, he felt,
tives respected the text. The Origin itself was would be their undoing. “Should we, then,
too long and too difficult for Yan to tackle. But now throw away all loyalty to our ruler?” he
Yan’s translations were enough to introduce to asked in his essay. “We most certainly should
China the basic ideas of evolution and, more not! Because the time has not arrived. … Our
importantly, the handful of Darwinian slo- people are not yet ready to rule themselves.”
gans that were taken up by social Darwinists (An argument that Chinese governments have
around the world.
used ever since to postpone
Subtle errors of translation,
“Chinese readings of democracy.)
however, went with them:
Sun Yat-sen, later dubiously
Darwin inspired two dubbed the father or George
“natural selection” came out
groups — reformers Washington of his country, was
as “natural elimination”;
the “survival of the fittest”
and revolutionaries.” also a professed Darwinian,
became the “superior survive
and an advocate of democracy.
and the inferior are defeated”; and, causing But Sun was as convinced that Darwinism was
the most confusion of all, “evolution” became for revolution as Yan, Kang and Liang were
jinhua lun, “the theory of progressive change”. convinced that it was for reform. One of Sun’s
Strictly speaking, Darwin did not prove that followers, Zou Rong, put it most succinctly:
evolution led to progress; to this day, that mis- “Revolution is a law of Evolution.”
translation makes it hard to discuss evolution
Taking advantage of the war against Japan,
in Chinese. As Confucius said: “If terms are Sun and his would-be revolutionaries put
not correct, discourse is difficult.”
their philosophy into action in 1895, hiring an
Just before Darwin’s ideas reached China, the ‘army’ from a secret society in Hong Kong in an
scholar and bureaucrat Kang Youwei argued attempt to capture the city of Guangzhou and
that Confucius had delineated three stages of trigger a revolution. It was an almost farcical
world progress: chaos, ascending peace and failure. They arrived in Guangzhou by ferry, but
great peace. A mixture of these ideas soon their weapons were on the wrong boat, leaving
spawned a plethora of ‘stage theories’ of his- them unarmed for their grand revolution. The
tory, all of which claimed to outline the natural police easily quashed them, although Sun manand inevitable development of all ‘fit races’. This aged to escape, eventually to Japan.
seemingly benign idea — that cosmic forces
A few years later, the reformers had only a
© 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved

8. little more luck. They won the ear of the young
Guangxu Emperor and established a constitutional monarchy — on paper — in the summer
of 1898. But the Emperor’s aunt, the Empress
Dowager, crushed the reform movement,
beheaded the six leaders she could catch and
put the Emperor under lifelong house arrest.
Yan was somehow left alone. Others, led by
Kang and Liang, took refuge in Japan.
The two self-professed Darwinian camps
had much in common. Both believed in stage
theories of history. Both were for democracy —
but not yet. Confucian philosophy led them to
believe that the fit were those who made themselves fit, and Daoist thinking made it easy to
believe in a natural path that the fit could follow to survive. Both believed, at once, in determinism and ‘determinationism’ — a potent if
illogical mix that at once met impatient patriots’
demand for action and promised victory.
Sadly, both camps also accepted the pervasive Western view that Darwin had proven
races unequal — that one race was ‘fitter’ and
therefore better than another. The reformers
had originally done so to disassociate themselves from those who had fallen prey to the
imperialists, such as the Africans and Indians.
But in their exile in Japan, reformers and revolutionaries alike turned angrily on the Manchus
as scapegoats, labelling them evolutionary low
life, whose ‘unnatural’ conquest of the Han
Chinese was responsible for China’s peril.
There were also crucial differences between
the camps. The reformers, despite everything,
remained loyal to the Guangxu Emperor.
They were convinced that the stage of constitutional monarchy could not be skipped, and
they were against civil war. The revolutionaries
believed that the Qing dynasty needed to be
overthrown, that China could ‘lie deng’ (leap
over stages) to catch up to the West and that
civil war was an indispensable precondition of
China’s evolution or progress. For a decade the
two groups debated the reform or revolution
question in Chinese journals smuggled back
to China from Japan — with both sides wildly
waving Darwin’s banner.
Enter the Marxists
In the end, the debate between reformers and
revolutionaries was settled by a nearly accidental success. On a truly dark and stormy night
in October 1911, Sun’s followers pulled off an
uprising in Wuchang. The dynasty soon fell,
with Yuan Shikai, the leading ‘loyalist’ general,
bought off with a gift of the presidency. But
Yuan killed the Republic by trying to crown
himself Emperor. Yuan’s generals baulked. Yuan
died. China fell to pieces, ruled by warlords.
The debate over reform and revolution revived.
Eventually the New Culture Movement arose,
with Darwinian reruns, as reformers gave up on
politics, embracing instead cultural reform —
until 1919, when the Western powers betrayed
China when they signed the Treaty of Versailles
at the end of the First World War, granting Germany’s ‘possessions’ in China to Japan.
In all of this, “politics”, as Mao would later
say, were “in command”. Few Chinese seemed
shocked by the fact of evolution, or indeed
overly interested in it. Unlike Europeans, few
perceived, at first, any threat to their traditional
philosophies or religions. But in the decade that
followed the failure of the Reform Movement,
© 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
Chinese philosophies — Confucianism,
Daoism and Buddhism — did come under
attack, as pacifistic doctrines that were unfit
because they had rendered China unfit to survive. And so, both philosophically and politically,
reformers and revolutionaries together created
a naturally abhorrent vacuum.
Many tried to fill it: Sun, Jiang Jieshi (Chiang
Kaishek) and, finally, the small group of intellectuals who, in indignation at the betrayal at
Versailles, found in Marxism what seemed to
them the fittest faith on Earth to help China
to survive.
This was not, of course, all Darwin’s doing,
but Darwin was involved in it all. To believe
in Marxism, one had to believe in inexorable
forces pushing mankind, or at least the elect,
to inevitable progress, through set stages
(which could, however, be skipped). One had
to believe that history was a violent, hereditary
class struggle (almost a ‘racial’ struggle); that
the individual must be severely subordinated to
the group; that an enlightened group must lead
the people for their own good; that the people
must not be humane to their enemies; that the
forces of history assured victory to those who
were right and who struggled.
Who taught Chinese these things? Marx?
Mao? No. Darwin.
■
James Pusey is a professor of Chinese Studies
at Bucknell University, 701 Moore Avenue,
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania 17837, USA. He is the
author of China and Charles Darwin (1983) and
Lu Xun and Evolution (1998).
e-mail: pusey@bucknell.edu
See go.nature.com/jCS3QL for further reading.
For more on Darwin see www.nature.com/darwin
163
G. LAM
OPINION
NATURE|Vol 462|12 November 2009

9. OPINION
NATURE|Vol 462|19 November 2009
Global Darwin: Multicultural mergers
Latin Americans first saw evolution as a reason to ‘whiten’ their societies, then as a reason to take pride in
their mixed lineage, says Jürgen Buchenau in the last of four pieces on Darwin’s global influence.
n 28 February 1832, the HMS
Beagle arrived at the port of
Bahia, Brazil, its second
stop on a five-year exploration of
the globe. The impressions that the
continent’s peculiar animal and plant
life made on the 22-year-old Charles
Darwin have been well documented. Less well
known is the effect Darwin had on the people
of Latin America.
In the late 1800s, Latin American intellectuals,
many of whom were politicians, used Darwin’s ideas to promote mass immigration from
Europe to ‘whiten’ and so ‘evolve’ their people.
Some 50 years later, Latin American thinkers
abandoned this emphasis on European superiority and instead supported the racial mixing,
education and unification of the region’s existing populations. That the social implications
of evolution were interpreted so differently
in such a short period of time is testament to
the extraordinary ability of people to bend
Darwin’s ideas to fit ever-changing intellectual
and political contexts.
Darwin’s life and work coincided with the
beginnings of modernization of the larger Latin
American nations after a long period of chaos.
By 1859, when On the Origin of Species was
published, countries such as Argentina, Brazil
and Mexico had suffered decades of economic
stagnation and political instability after achieving independence from European countries in
the 1820s. Their largely Catholic societies were
made up of African American and Amerindian
majorities dominated by a small white elite.
Throughout the continent, this elite tended
to divide into liberals and conservatives, with
each group having different takes on how to
improve society. The conservatives, wary of
Protestant nations such as the United States,
favoured the development of internal economic
markets. The liberals, many of whom had studied overseas, believed that foreign investment
was key to building their countries’ infrastructure. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when industrial production skyrocketed
in western Europe and North America, liberals
gained power throughout Latin America, and
directed the destinies of most nations until the
Great Depression of the 1930s.
As well as developing export economies to
feed Western demand for raw materials, liberal politicians sought to evolve their societies
O
284
based on their own version of social and African American ones, with the estabDarwinism. They soaked up the lishment of European-style cities and institulatest ideas from Europe, and read tions. For example, the government of dictator
the works of philosophers such as Porfirio Díaz remodelled parts of Mexico City,
Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton, importing Italian marble to replace local buildDarwin’s cousin and the inventor of ing materials and following European trends
eugenics. Most Latin Americans in architecture and street design. They pushed
thought that society, like nature, evolved from the poor majority out of sight when foreign
primitive to complex structures, and saw the investors came to visit the capital.
industrial societies of western Europe as being
more culturally sophisticated than their own. No European superman
They maintained that Latin American societies Attempts to westernize Latin Americans were
could evolve towards the supposedly superior short-lived: the tumultuous first half of the
European and US models.
twentieth century destroyed the liberal modModernizers held various views on how ernizers’ belief in European superiority — and
best to achieve this progressive change. Some with it, the idea of historical evolution through
embraced the ‘hard inheritance’ theory of Ger- white immigration.
man priest and biologist Gregor Mendel, and
The death toll of the First World War
argued that ‘whitening’ their nations’ stock demonstrated that Europeans had not evolved
through interbreeding was the only path to into superior human beings. A decade later, the
societal improvement. Others followed the Great Depression swept away the export econo‘soft inheritance’ notion of French naturalist mies underlying modernization in Argentina at
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and countered that peo- least as much as it did in Mexico and Peru, belyple’s inheritable traits could be changed simply ing the notion that the whitening of the popuby altering their environment, including their lation would lead to permanent social progress.
education, diet and living conditions.
And amid the global economic crisis, the rise of
Initially, the Mendelians prevailed. Latin totalitarian systems in Germany and the Soviet
American governments attempted to recruit Union stripped away most of the remaining
admiration Latin American
prospective European immigrants. The surge of Euro“Most Latin Americans intellectuals held for Europeans that had entered the
pean models.
thought that society,
United States had shown the
Instead of rejecting Darlike nature, evolved
win’s ideas outright, a new
draw of available farmland
group of intellectuals — the
in attracting foreigners. With
from primitive to
cultural nationalists — came
scant funds, governments
complex structures.”
sponsored colonizing comup with a revised formulation
panies to send recruiters to
of how their societies should
Europe to lure farmers to underpopulated evolve. Although Darwin wasn’t specifically
invoked in such theories, his body of thought
rural areas in Latin America.
Those countries with ample farmland and a was still influential; so much so that the culclimate similar to that of western Europe suc- tural nationalists might today be described
ceeded in pulling people across. Between 1870 as having adopted their own brand of social
and 1930, more than 11 million Britons, Ger- Darwinism. In particular, Mexican and Bramans, Irish, Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards zilian thinkers began to see the unique ethnic
settled in Argentina, southern Brazil, Chile mixtures that shaped their nations as assets
and Uruguay. By 1900, people of European rather than liabilities — as long as those of Afriorigin dominated society in Argentina and can, European and Amerindian descent could
Uruguay. Other nations with large indigenous be fused into a single culture. They increasingly
populations and little available farmland — began to tout the blending of racial groups as
such as Mexico and Peru — saw much less a way to forge new and improved social systems — societies that would not suffer from
immigration from Europe.
European ideas and values spread across Europe’s many ills. Not all agreed: for much of
Latin America at the expense of Amerindian the twentieth century, Argentines continued
© 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved

10. OPINION
G. LAM
NATURE|Vol 462|19 November 2009
to hope that their largely European-populated
capital of Buenos Aires would someday emerge
as the Paris of the New World.
Instead of encouraging immigration and
with that, greater technological and societal
complexity, Latin American cultural nationalists wanted to unify society through public
education. Education had been available to
no more than 15% of the population in most
countries, and cultural nationalists knew that
the expansion of literacy among the poor, nonEuropean majority was crucial to instilling a
sense of national pride and citizenship. Even
more importantly, they knew that literacy
campaigns would give them an opportunity to
promote an official version of history — one
that emphasized racial and ethnic blending as
a source of national pride.
The cosmic race
José Vasconcelos, Mexico’s first cabinet-level
education secretary and a university-educated
man of European descent, was one person
who adopted this viewpoint. He argued that
traditions of the past were something people
should be proud of but that progress in the
present required eroding cultural diversity by
means of mass education. His La Raza Cósmica (The Cosmic Race) essay, published in
1925, presented Mexican history as an evolutionary process that led from Aztec and European beginnings to the mestizo, a mixture of
European and Amerindian ancestry. Vasconcelos thought that the mestizo was a ‘cosmic
race’ that was superior to its component parts.
He highlighted the cultural achievements of
the pre-Columbian civilizations, but argued
that social progress would come from assimilating their descendants into the mestizo identity. Vasconcelos designed a rural education
programme intended to bring literacy to those
who could not read, and Spanish to the Amerindian minority that spoke more than 60 different languages and dialects. It took decades
for the programme to succeed.
In the 1930s, Brazilian sociologist Gilberto
Freyre similarly proposed that Brazil was a
“racial democracy” whose people considered
racial blending an advantage rather than a disadvantage. In an argument that became known
as Lusotropicalism, Freyre maintained that
the Portuguese colonists who brought African
slaves to Brazil were uniquely suited to survive
in the tropics and that the subsequent intermixing had created a harmonious society that
contrasted positively with the racism persisting
in the United States.
Freyre’s ideas, most famously laid out in his
1933 Casa-Grande e Senzala (The Masters and
the Slaves), contradicted the stark realities in
Brazil where social status was largely predicated
on the degree of African ancestry, and Brazilians
of European descent held virtually all important
political and economic positions. Like Vasconcelos, Freyre can be interpreted as borrowing
from Darwin in arguing for the melding of races
as a positive evolutionary step. Freyre also did so
in part to play down social problems.
After Vasconcelos and Freyre, Darwininspired thought in Latin America became
unfashionable, in large part due to the effects
of the Great Depression and the Second World
War. Just as the First World War had eroded the
idea of European superiority, the Second World
War dealt a serious blow to notions of human
history as a progressive process. After the war,
Latin Americans still found themselves lagging
behind the industrialized world in terms of
economic development. Influenced by socialism, many Latin American intellectuals and
© 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
politicians discarded the idea of evolutionary,
gradual progress, embracing instead social
revolution as the solution to the region’s problems. Rather than imitating the Europeans and
the United States, socialists saw the industrialized North Atlantic societies as part of the
problem. In 1959, the Cuban Revolution set up
Latin America’s first communist government,
and in the 1970s, socialist governments were
established in Chile and Nicaragua.
From roughly 1870 to about 1930, Darwin’s
ideas resonated in Latin American political
thought. During this relatively short period,
Latin America’s intellectuals went from
thinking that evolution by natural selection
explained European geopolitical superiority to
using evolutionary models to promote cultural
nationalism and the unification of the multiracial societies in which they lived. Either way,
they found Darwin’s notion of evolution useful in developing their ideas. As these nations
struggled to unify their mix of indigenous,
European and African populations, they saw
themselves — as did their counterparts in
the United States, Canada and Australia — as
societies under construction from scratch.
Throughout, Latin American political thinkers
shared an optimistic belief that these societies
could and would ‘evolve’ in a positive direction
— whatever that direction might be.
■
Jürgen Buchenau is chair of the department
of history at the University of North Carolina
at Charlotte, 9201 University City Boulevard,
Charlotte, North Carolina 28223, USA, and is the
author of Mexican Mosaic: A Brief History of Mexico.
e-mail: jbuchenau@uncc.edu
See go.nature.com/5bHVBD for further reading.
For more on Darwin see www.nature.com/darwin,
or to discuss all four pieces in the Global Darwin
series see go.nature.com/Figu8x.
285