Cuvi, Nicolás, y Delfín Viera. 20 21. _History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and Evolutionism in the American Tropics._ En Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on (1).pdf

History and the Quest for a Historiography
of Scientific Explorations and Evolutionism
in the American Tropics
Nicolás Cuvi and Delfín Viera
Contents
Introduction ....................................................................................... 2
Naturalist Explorations in the Tropics ............................................................ 5
Historiography of Naturalist Explorations ....................................................... 14
Evolutionism in Tropical America ............................................................... 18
Historiography of Evolutionism .................................................................. 21
Conclusions ....................................................................................... 23
References ........................................................................................ 25
Abstract
We present a panoramic view of the history of scientific explorations and evolu-
tionism, and its historiography over the last four decades, on the American
tropics, especially those territories corresponding to present-day Ecuador, Colom-
bia, and Venezuela, with some allusions to Bolivia, Peru, Panama, and Costa
Rica. The historiography in these two fields in the last 40 years has grown and
gained depth, from more “internalist,” universalist, compilatory, descriptive, and
hagiographical approaches, to critical and social narratives that focus on local
actors, international networks, and science as power. Nation-state approaches still
predominate though. The most recent works have been influenced by STS
positions, situated in local contexts. Classic explorations and characters such as
José Celestino Mutis and Alexander von Humboldt have been radically
reevaluated, and many processes of circulation of evolutionism, unknown until
N. Cuvi (*)
Department of Anthropology, History and Humanities, Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences
(FLACSO Sede Ecuador), Quito, Ecuador
e-mail: ncuvi@flacso.edu.ec
D. Viera
Department of Biology and Chemistry, University Nucleus “Rafael Rangel”, University of the
Andes, Trujillo, Venezuela
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies
on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48616-7_7-1
1

recently, revealed and analyzed. The relevance of knowledges and traditions of
local scientists and institutions, guides, collectors, traders, painters, and Indige-
nous, among others, hitherto largely invisible actors and processes, in America
and Spain, has been reinterpreted. Today, there are more professionals in the
history of science, with more active clusters in Bogotá and Madrid. The growing
amount of research has been reflected in articles and books of remarkable depth
and originality, which provide original theoretical categories and offer interesting
and novel paths of inquiry.
Introduction
The biological diversity and complexity of the American tropics was first known and
managed by the millenarian inhabitants of these territories. Since the sixteenth
century, it has also aroused the interest of Europeans and Creoles that assimilated,
appropriated, translated, and mobilized those local knowledges, oral stories, tradi-
tions, and elements of the territory, through collections of specimens, writings,
drawings, maps, archives, and ships. Such artifacts served to generate novel theo-
retical approaches in natural history, geology, geography, ethnography, and cartog-
raphy, all of them functional for the control of space and people. Over time, the
emerging knowledge, already mixed, was assimilated or resignified by individuals
and institutions in tropical America that, at times, tried to resemble the European
ones, such as universities, scientific societies, or literary clubs. It is true that Latin
America’s rich history of cultural adaptations, suppressions, and hybridizations
“cannot be labeled non-Western without serious qualifications” and that
As the first colonial outpost of the early-modern European world, Latin America has long
witnessed complex processes of cultural cross-pollination, suppression, and adaptation.
Beginning in the fifteenth century, millenarian Amerindian civilizations, heirs to rich local
“scientific” traditions, seemingly gave way to European institutions of learning and to new
dominant forms of representing the natural world. (Cueto and Cañizares-Esguerra 2018)
In Lima, the first university was opened in 1551, in Bogotá in 1580, in Quito in
1620, and in Caracas in 1721. Cabinets, museums, herbariums, botanical gardens,
and libraries were organized. Treatises, books, inventories, manuals, and chairs were
disseminated and created. Since the nineteenth century, this used to happen through
initiatives of the republics, although seeking support from foreigners. Over time,
local explorers also started to mobilize knowledges using European devices, with
fewer resources, but always relying on local peoples.
The history of these processes has been told in different ways, building a rich
historiography. The narratives range from traditional hagiographies or “internalist”
histories (told by travelers, their scientific successors, or historians to the present day,
sometimes associated with nationalist or imperialist imaginaries), to stories that,
since the late twentieth century, have observed science and technology as something
2 N. Cuvi and D. Viera

more social, intrinsic to power relations and colonialism that, on many occasions,
submerge local actors and their knowledges. Science is approached today as an
activity that weaves complex and increasingly known transnational and global
networks (Cueto and Silva 2020; Barahona 2018; Horta Duarte 2013).
Although in the 1990s the social history of science in Latin America (and about
Latin America) was barely an emerging field, this diagnosis has changed (Cueto and
Silva 2020). A professionalization and emergence of critical approaches arose as part
of the institutionalization of STS science studies in the region (Kreimer et al. 2014).
The connection of local historians with each other and with colleagues and institu-
tions elsewhere also helped. Social and critical studies of science have been
published in specialized Latin American journals, starting with Quipu in 1984, and
also in Spanish, French, German, or Anglo-Saxon journals and publishers of history
of science. A notable effort that represented the transition toward different narratives
in tropical America were the volumes of the Social history of science in Colombia,
produced in the 1980s and 1990s. It has helped to leave behind deficit approaches,
such as the one that argued that in Colombia there was a surprising “absence of a
debate on Darwin or any other scientific concept during the nineteenth century”
(Safford 1985, 431). There have been processes, sometimes more sustained, some-
times punctual and discontinuous, toward the critical historicizing of knowledge.
The greatest production has occurred in Bogotá, a cluster of activity, where notable
efforts are mobilized, even by nontropical researchers. In Lima, Quito, and Medellin,
there have been isolated but relevant initiatives, especially in the history of medicine,
sometimes in connection with botany. In Venezuela, there occurred important
processes in university spaces, but the current situation is one of ongoing
deterioration.
A first set of narratives elaborated about knowledge in the American tropics, with
nuances and crossovers, is made up of hundreds of compilations and descriptions
that reveal sources and archives, actors, and institutions. Many of these, less
theoretical but important stories, continue to appear in the form of books, chapters,
or scholarly journal articles. A second set, each time less used, ascribes, at times
uncritically, to the idea of empty spaces of “scientific knowledge” to which ideas
were “diffused”: the classic approach proposed by Basalla in 1967, the rigid model
of centers and peripheries. Fertile as it was, giving rise to an enormous consensus,
literature, and discussions, recent researches have shown its many limitations. A
third set of narratives emphasizes the active and central role of local peoples; it
ranges from stories about the existence of deep American knowledges, before
and after 1500, and contains the argument that the European Scientific Revolution
and Enlightenment only were possible by the encounter with America (and Africa)
and the empirical practices associated with the Atlantic exchange (Castro-Gómez
2005; Barrera-Osorio 2006; Cañizares-Esguerra 2006). A similar argument has been
proposed from Asia: “knowledges that thus emerged were totally contingent on the
encounter and that important parts of what passes off as ‘Western’ science were
actually made outside the West” (Raj 2007, 223). Likewise, the prominence of
several European kingdoms or nations, mistakenly considered “peripheral” to mod-
ern science, is becoming increasingly recognized (Arabatzis et al. 2015). Partly as a
History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and. . . 3

consequence of these reflections, there is a tendency to construct new histories that
connect places, individuals, artifacts, and ideas, in order to understand the complex
material and social hybrid sometimes named as technoscience.
These sets of narratives’ styles follow, in many ways, those proposed by Cueto
and Silva (2020) for the historiography of science and medicine in Latin America.
Although they situate their work overall in three countries of greater extension and
population, their proposal of four styles/stages, with permeable limits, is a good
reference to categorize the approaches of history of science in the region that include
some aspects already mentioned. Those styles/stages are as follows: (1) the rise of
universalism, (2) reception and local dynamics, (3) international networks and new
social actors, and (4) the global turn.
Faced with the profuse and diverse literature in the history of life sciences in Latin
America, this chapter attempts a broad (and probably ambitious) synthesis of the
history and historiography of two specific themes: scientific explorations
(a practice), and evolutionism (an idea). Many fields were left out, including history
of medicine, forestry, agriculture, cattle raising, marine sciences, geology,
conservationism, physiology, microbiology, embryology, genetics, and neurobiol-
ogy, among others, that have marked life sciences, increasingly complex, especially
from the twentieth century on.
This chapter is about the histories and historiographies of expeditionism and
evolutionism in the current territories of Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, with
allusions to Peru, Bolivia, Panama, and Costa Rica. Although Tropical America is
largely Brazil and the Caribbean, the production in that country and that latter region
is beyond the scope of this chapter. Two main purposes stand out: first, to highlight
events, actors, and processes with a connected approach, that is, to tell the main parts
of the story to those not familiar with the region and some aspects of its history;
second, to analyze the ways in which these stories have been told, especially since
the 1980s, leaving aside, therefore, abundant narratives made before, starting with
the first Spanish chronicles or geographic relations.
To choose the sources, the first selection was of works written in Spanish,
developed by historians located in the American tropics and in Spain, who some-
times publish in other languages, especially English. This could be a contribution for
scholars and students around the world who, mainly for language reasons, do not
have access to these sources and approaches and therefore may find some less
“famous” stories. The reader may think this chapter offers a selection of cases.
That first selection of works was also practical, as it may be impossible to visit the
enormous production on explorations and evolutionism produced in other lan-
guages, since visitors to the American tropics such as Alexander von Humboldt or
Charles Darwin, among many others, have received multiple studies. Some works
first published in English, then translated to Spanish and published in the tropics
because of their local relevance, were also considered. Also some works are made by
authors writing in English who, located elsewhere, investigate local/tropical actors.
Finally, a handful of untranslated influential English-language works were reviewed.
The final selection of sources and authors relied on research in catalogues and
databases and in six interviews made in February 2020 with historians and

sociologists of science located in Bogotá. At the end, more than 300 references on
explorations and evolutionism were collected, so among them a large number of
more descriptive works were left aside, sometimes hagiographic or compilatory. As
for the most active authors, one or two works that illustrate their themes, approaches,
and narratives were selected. Anyhow, many good works were left out of the list of
references, just naming the authors without quoting their books, chapters, or journal
articles. Specialists in these regions and subjects might consider the work as not
exhaustive, so the reader is faced with a broad synthesis that hopefully will arouse
interest and spark curiosity in the treated fields.
The two topics chosen, history of explorations and evolutionism, are among the
most researched in the history of life sciences. Explorations to the tropics served to
gather evidence, sustain theories, and build fields such as modern ecology or the
theory of evolution. The Chimborazo mountain was fundamental to explain
Humboldt’s biogeography. Similarly, Galapagos’ birds and terrestrial turtles were
crucial to support ideas such as natural selection, speciation, or adaptive radiation.
Both European explorers were greatly admired and followed by other travelers and
scientists. In the case of evolutionism in Latin America, it often circulated as “social
Darwinism,” closely linked to power relations. A much explored vein of that social
Darwinism, eugenics, has received much attention in the region, not only from the
history of science and medicine.
Naturalist Explorations in the Tropics
The powerful and complex natural environment that Europeans encountered in the
American tropics filled them with not only awe and wonder, but also with fears and
insecurities. The diversity of ecosystems, species, and microclimates stood out
before their gaze, as did the domestication of plants and animals that the Indigenous
had carried out. Their amazement was genuine: Columbus described in his diaries, in
October 1492, his conviction that he was in Paradise; something similar was reported
by Amerigo Vespucci in his 1500 letter to Lorenzo de Medici. From early on, the
Amazon was understood as a space with the potential of hosting desired things such
as gold, cinnamon, slaves, or territorial possessions, in which European myths
seemed to materialize, as that of warrior women, the Amazons, or the one that
became hybridized in America about a city of gold named El Dorado. The foreign
assimilation and understanding of that natural world included many visions that
denigrated it as inferior. In any case, the colonial process gave way to a feverish
exchange between various continents. Knowledges, ideas, foods, recipes, customs,
animals, vegetables, minerals, diseases, and people circulated intensively. In some
cases, it led to population exterminations or intense landscape transformations, for
example, after the introduction of sheep or extended deforestation processes. The
Atlantic Ocean not only was full of possibilities but also was a formidable barrier,
not only wide but filled with hitherto unknown winds and currents, foul weather,
tempests, and hurricanes. Crossing it safely was by no means a small feat; many
collections were lost in wreckage even as late as the nineteenth century. The reader

might wonder how much irreplaceable materials were also lost because of insects,
fungi, weather, or mistreatment.
Europe set itself the colossal task of knowing, collecting, ordering, interpreting,
and mobilizing that “new world,” its nature, and inhabitants. The explorations
benefited from scratch from a marriage between geography and botany. The searches
for minerals, dyes, food, wood, medicines, and remedies, and for cartographic,
geographic, astronomical, meteorological, and ethnographic purposes, never
stopped. That insatiable and permanent appetite to capture and collect had impacts
on native and endemic species that today rest as inert samples in museums and
herbariums, or were completely lost during maritime voyages.
Dozens of expeditions were sent from Spain, and also from other European
kingdoms. The chroniclers, sometimes sailors (at times corsairs and pirates), acted
as the first naturalists, collecting and organizing observations and testimonies,
starting with those of the Indigenous peoples. Spain generated the first “scientific”
expedition to present-day Mexico between 1570 and 1577, led by Francisco
Hernández, to collect medicinal plants and associated knowledges, using Indigenous
informants and producing figures and texts in Nahuatl, a native language. Something
similar happened with the Florentine Codex prepared by Bernardino de Sahagún.
A rich European bibliography on the American tropics was produced in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chronicles, relationships, and firsthand testi-
monies were published on the peoples, places, and biodiversity of America, as well
as secondhand narratives and interpretations. Most of the firsthand histories were
made by religious and Spanish officials. Reality and fantasy generated powerful
hybrids, although various aspects became clearer as the explorations increased.
European kingdoms competed to be the first to reach “undiscovered” and vast
territories, seas, and islands; sometimes, they did so by chance, such as the arrival
of Tomás de Berlanga in 1535 to the Galapagos archipelago, or the first complete
European trip through the Amazon, by the military man Francisco de Orellana and
the religious chronicler Gaspar de Carvajal in 1541–1542. A commonly highlighted
work was produced by the Jesuit José de Acosta in 1590, who toured and analyzed
the natural history of Peru, Mexico, and other American sites. The management of
the American space became increasingly complex due to European and African
influences, in the second case by people mobilized as slaves. Baggages of knowl-
edges about space management were transferred from those continents to America.
The eighteenth century saw the rise of formal “scientific expeditions” to tropical
America, beginning with the Geodesic Mission (or Expedition) to Peru, between
1735 and 1744 to present-day Ecuador, well studied by historians such as Antonio
Lafuente and Antonio Mazuecos, Eduardo Estrella, Miguel Ángel Puig-Samper, or
Neil Safier, among others. Its objective was to determine the value of one degree of
the arc of a meridian and establish whether the Earth was flattened at the poles. Four
French academicians, two Spanish naval officers, a cartographer, an engineer, a
surgeon, a watchmaker, and two French assistants, as well as servants and slaves,
participated. Two members made important contributions to natural history: botanist
Joseph de Jussieau and Charles Marie de La Condamine. The latter gave news in
Europe about rubber and made the first formal description of the Cinchona trees of

Loja, and the first complete and accurate map of the Amazon River, which he
traveled in 1743 with the Riobambeño geographer Pedro Vicente Maldonado.
Shortly after, in 1754 occurred the Expedition of Limits, to determine the borders
between the Spanish and Portuguese possessions in the Amazonas and Orinoco
rivers’ basins (present-day Venezuela and Brazil). A disciple of Linnaeus, the
Swedish botanist Pehr Löfling (Loefling), participated in it but died all too soon,
without time to accomplish his ambitious tasks. This explorer has been studied by
historians such as Francisco Pelayo, Styg Ryden, and Manuel Lucena Giraldo,
among others.
During the second half of the eighteenth century, several explorers traveled only
through the Caribbean coasts, without entering inland, unlike Löfling. The Dutch-
Austrian botanist and explorer Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin collected specimens in
the Caribbean, Central America, and present-day Colombia and Venezuela, financed
by the Austrian Court; he has been studied by Santiago Madriñan. Another Austrian,
Joseph Märter, arrived with the same purpose to present-day Venezuela and has been
researched by Helga Lindorf. Among the best-known explorations were the three
botanical expeditions organized under the enlightened and reformist Spanish Bour-
bon policy: the Royal Expedition to the New Kingdom of Granada starting in 1783,
led by the physician and botanist José Celestino Mutis; the Royal Botanical Expe-
dition to the Viceroyalty of Peru, beginning in 1777 with the botanists Hipólito Ruiz
and Joseph Pavón at the head; and the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain,
starting in 1787, led by the physician Martín de Sessé. The first two had a special
interest in the knowledge of Cinchona. These botanical expeditions have been
recurrently visited by hundreds of historians; around them, sources are still being
discovered and controversies raised.
Enterprises such as the Malaspina Expedition initiated in 1789 and had several
natural history ingredients. One of its members, the Bohemian Tadeo Haenke, made
inventories and observations in Peru, Bolivia, and other territories in South America.
This expedition has been visited by many historians, including Juan Pimentel, María
Dolores Higueras, Virginia González Claverán, Rafael Sagredo, José Ignacio
González Leiva, Andrés Galera, and Victoria Ibáñez.
The turn of the century saw the well-known voyage of the Prussian Alexander
von Humboldt and the French Aimé Bonpland, between 1799 and 1804. Among
other things, their travel connects, in the narratives, the tropical American territory.
In cities such as Bogotá, Quito, and Lima, they encountered Creoles who had
scientific works, but who were seldom recognized as key informants by Humboldt,
or not recognized at all. These travelers published observations and analysis of
America, along with landscapes and drawings of plants and animals, such as one
of a Condor (an Andean vulture) and of an Amazonian monkey, the black bearded
saki (Fig. 1). That monkey was first called by the Prussian as Simia Satanas, a name
that soon changed to Chiropotes satanas. Humboldt was no stranger to the fascina-
tion for tropical nature:
When a traveller newly arrived from Europe penetrates for the first time into the forests of
South America, he beholds nature under an unexpected aspect. He feels at every step, that he

is not on the confines but in the centre of the torrid zone; not in one of the West India Islands,
but on a vast continent where everything is gigantic, —mountains, rivers, and the mass of
vegetation. If he feel strongly the beauty of picturesque scenery he can scarcely define the
various emotions which crowd upon his mind; he can scarcely distinguish what most excites
his admiration, the deep silence of those solitudes, the individual beauty and contrast of
forms, or that vigour and freshness of vegetable life which characterize the climate of the
tropics. It might be said that the earth, overloaded with plants, does not allow them space
enough to unfold themselves. (Humboldt and Bonpland 1907/1807)
Many religious (Jesuits, Dominicans, and Franciscans) acted as explorers since
the first contact, making observations of fauna, flora, ethnology, and cartography.
Joseph Gumilla, for example, in his book El Orinoco Ilustrado of 1741, described
the preparation of the curare poison and gave accounts of Amazonian living beings
and Indigenous peoples, although without mentioning any individual in particular, as
if they were an amorphous mass. Many religious cartographers concentrated on
mapping the rivers, the main communication channels. Some were Samuel Fritz,
Antonio Caulín, Felipe Salvador Gilig, or the Swiss Joannes (Juan) Magnin. One
simple map of Magnin, a simple drawing on a section of the Amazon, the Morona
and Santiago rivers, and its tributaries, in present-day Ecuador, is shown in Fig. 2.
Also in the eighteenth century, missionaries such as Juan de Velasco, from
Riobamba, published works on the natural history of the American tropics,
defending its superiority in comparison to European nature. The activities of this
Fig. 1 Drawings of a Condor and a black bearded saki. (Source: Humboldt and Bonpland (1811–
1833). Bibliothèque nationale de France)

enormous group of actors gave rise to the idea of the “scientific missionary,” used by
modern historians to categorize not only religious but also nonreligious individuals.
Religious missionaries have continued to be influential, especially in frontier terri-
tories; in some way, they have been, like the military explorers in the first centuries
and private companies after, “representatives” of the State in those remote places.
Some of their members still make collections, observations, and publications on
nature and culture.
In the nineteenth century, nation-states emerged after the independence wars in
Spanish America. As many territories were hitherto badly known by the State
institutions and to modern science, the new countries hired, at different rates and
times, until the twentieth century, European and national scientists for inventories of
flora, fauna, and minerals, drawing of maps, strengthening and/or creation of
botanical gardens, museums, universities and chairs, and scientific stations, or to
promote extractive activities: “They also created the technical and financial condi-
tions for extending the reach of the state through developments of railroads,
Fig. 2 The course of the
Morona River, from Macas
and downstream, and of the
Santiago River. (Source: Juan
Magnin, Manuscript map,
1743, 39 53 cm.
Bibliothèque nationale de
France)

telegraphs, mining, export agriculture, and public health” (Cueto and Cañizares-
Esguerra 2018).
Many of these men relied on scientific networks with Europe and the United
States. For example, the Scotsman William Jameson, based in Quito since 1826,
maintained intense exchanges with Kew Gardens. The Italian geographer Agustín
Codazzi published an Atlas in 1840 in Venezuela and headed the Chorographic
Commission between 1850 and 1859 in Colombia, an exploration that recruited
naturalists, botanists, and painters. The results of that work proved to be a major
historical milestone for the imaginary of Colombia as a nation, as noted by historians
such as Olga Restrepo Forero, Nancy Applebaum, among others. In Ecuador, some
Jesuits were brought in 1870 to the recently founded National Polytechnic Univer-
sity; among them were the German geographer and geologist Theodor Wolf and the
Italian botanist Luis Sodiro. Around the same time, in Peru, the Italian geographer
Antonio Raimondi was in charge of implementing several natural sciences’ chairs in
the university, as the German Adolfo Ernst in Venezuela. Several of these men were
also involved in the local circulation of evolutionism from the university classrooms.
Apart from the explorations financed by nations, in the nineteenth century, there
were private naturalists or adventurers, many of them Germans, as the tropical
American experience could be crucial for their academic career later at home.
Wilhelm Sievers made relevant contributions to the geography and geology of
Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. Karl Ferdinand Appun collected plants and
animals in Venezuela and English Guiana. Alphons Stübel and Wilhelm Reiss
made volcanology and geographical studies in Ecuador and Colombia. German
Alfred Hettner also visited Colombia, and Carl Friedrich Eduard Otto traveled
through Venezuela, Cuba, and the United States. The English Richard Spruce went
up from the Amazon to the Ecuadorian Sierra and led the first successful smuggling
of Cinchona seeds to Europe and Asia. His compatriot Alfred R. Wallace also
explored the Amazon and traveled up the Negro River to Venezuelan jungles. The
also English orchidologist Charles H. Lankester traveled through Costa Rica. At the
end of the nineteenth century, there were also Spanish explorations, such as the well-
known Scientific Commission of the Pacific (see http://www.pacifico.csic.es/), with
the naturalist Marcos Jiménez de la Espada, studied by Leoncio López-Ocón, MÁ
Puig-Samper, and Ma. de los Ángeles Calatayud, among others. There were many
other botanical collectors, ornithologists, entomologists, mammologists, paleontol-
ogists, and ichthyologists, who worked in several countries and which for reasons of
space cannot be detailed here.
In addition to naturalists, the explorations involved actors more difficult to trace
such as artists and painters, or less known as commercial collectors or guides. It has
been noticed that Humboldt’s divulgative strategy decisively influenced the emer-
gence of scientific art and inspired many artists to travel and represent the tropics
(Garrido et al. 2016). Among the group of painters who came in the wake of the
Prussian and Bonpland were Frederic Edwin Church, who was in Ecuador, or the
German Ferdinand Bellermann who went to Venezuela and painted a beautiful oil of
La Cueva del Guácharo (Guácharo Cave), in Caripe, North Eastern Venezuela
(Fig. 3). In the Chorographic Commission, some painters were the Colombian

Manuel María Paz or the Englishman Henry Price. In that country, also worked the
English diplomat Edward Walhouse Mark. In Ecuador, Rafael Troya, originally a
local painter of religious themes, was hired and trained by Stübel to paint landscapes
and volcanos. Also the Frenchman Auguste Morisot went to Orinoquia between
1886 and 1887, as part of the French expedition led by Jean Chaffanjon, who
claimed to have discovered the headwaters of the Orinoco River, which was untrue.
The Orinoco headwaters became some kind of national obsession or challenge
(similar to that around the headwaters of the Amazon River) and only were precisely
established by a French-Venezuelan expedition more than 60 years after. Many
artists portrayed the tropics with oils, watercolor, or engravings, until the appearance
of photographers like the Hungarian Pal Rosti, who toured the United States,
Mexico, and Cuba, and took the ﬁrst landscape photos of Venezuela in 1857.
Many explorations occurred until the twentieth century in Nicaragua and Panama,
associated with the future construction of the interoceanic channel; some have been
studied by Stanley Heckadon Moreno. The Panama Channel led to the formation of
the Barro Colorado Island, where in 1923 the Smithsonian Tropical Research
Institute was established, becoming, in their own words, one of the most intensively
studied tropical forests in the world. A photo from that island in the 1950s (Fig. 4)
shows its strategic position.
Fig. 3 Guácharo Cave (La Cueva del Guácharo). (Source: Ferdinand Bellermann, Oil in canvas,
1874, 118.75 156.85 cm. Photography: Mark Morosse. Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros)

In the twentieth century, the Swiss-American forester Henri Pittier was influential
in Costa Rica and Venezuela. In the first country, he was in charge of the recently
founded National Physical-Geographic Institute and was important for other insti-
tutionalization processes. Another important scientist was the German Ernst Schäfer,
founder of the Rancho Grande Biological Station in the coast of Venezuela in 1950.
There were explorations in several countries to the still unknown, but rich in
resources, Amazon. The Second Geodesic Mission arrived in Ecuador in 1901, led
by 23 French soldiers, among them Paul Rivet, who made ethnographic observa-
tions; this mission has been a topic of research by Ernesto Capello. The Swiss
expedition of Otto Fuhrmann and Eugène Mayor took place in Colombia in 1910.
National expeditions, to even uncharted territories, continued along the twentieth
century. For instance, in 1956 occurred the first exploration of the School of Biology
of the Central University of Venezuela to the Auyán-tepui, a topic visited by Helga
Fig. 4 Ship traveling through Gatun Lake, Panama Canal, from Barro Colorado Island, 1953.
(Source: Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image #92-15291)

Lindorf (the Tepuys are the table mountains in the Great savanna that inspired the
1912 novel The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle).
Expeditions from the United States increased since the nineteenth century, and
there was greater emphasis on zoological collections. An early one was that of the
Williams College in Venezuela, in 1867, studied by Yolanda Texera Arnal. Some
went to the Galapagos, such as that of the California Academy of Sciences in
1905–1906; expeditions to that archipelago have been studied by US scholars
such as Elizabeth Hennessy or Matthew J. James, among others. A Norwegian
zoological expedition, conducted by Alf Wollebaik, also went to that archipelago
and to Colombia in 1925. Important zoological expeditions were headed by person-
nel from the American Museum of Natural History. There were explorations for
ornithological captures in Colombia and Venezuela studied by Camilo Quintero Toro
and Yolanda Texera Arnal, among others. In the latter country, the paleontologist and
evolutionary biologist G. G. Simpson made some incursions, also under the aegis of
the AMNH, that called the attention of Hebe Vessuri.
There were scientific missions for the promotion of native and introduced crops.
Cacao, rubber, bananas, sugar, or coffee were exploited, sometimes in relation with
private institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation. Since World War II, it
increasingly occurred in the framework of international cooperation for develop-
ment. In Venezuela, the first state agricultural scientific stations were implemented
with the support of the Belgian engineer Fernand Miesse in the 1910s. They did not
prosper due to his resignation but gave rise to the arrival of Pittier and the creation of
the Experimental Station of Agriculture and Forestry. Pittier also spearheaded
environmental conservation efforts in that country, which resulted in the first Ven-
ezuelan national park in 1937. There were also many geological expeditions,
associated with the search for oil in the coastal and Amazonian sides of the Andes.
These interventions of the United States in tropical agriculture and tropical biodi-
versity research have been researched by historians such as Stuart McCook, Chris-
topher Shepherd, Megan Raby, John Soluri, Leida Fernández, and Nicolás Cuvi,
among others; many studies have focused on the processes of the Green Revolution.
The twentieth century saw an increase in explorations led by local scientists. For
example, in 1937, the Ecuadorian government sent a National Scientific Commis-
sion to Galapagos, organized by the Central University, in order to reinforce the first
declarations of the archipelago as a protected area in 1934 and 1936.
Several Spanish exiles arrived, mainly in Venezuela and Colombia. Geologist
José Royo Gómez or botanist Josep Cuatrecasas Arumí, among others, contributed
to scientific knowledge of the countries and also taught young students. Scholars
such as Carlos Acosta Rizo or José María López Sánchez have focused on these
scientists. In the second half of the twentieth century, exiles arrived from Brazil,
Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, leaving their countries due to dictatorships.
The diversity of explorations presented reflects a personal selection, as a complete
synthesis of the hundreds of efforts cannot be detailed. But indeed, this selection
aloud an analysis of some perspectives in the historical narratives.

Historiography of Naturalist Explorations
Scientific explorations, together with medical topics (which sometimes overlap),
have received the greatest attention in the local history of science (and also in stories
built from outside the tropics). This has been influenced by the importance given to
science and scientists in the construction of the nation, sometimes extolled as
fundamental in the independence processes. Also the fact that these explorations
were, with rare exceptions, the most important scientific enterprises of European
kingdoms, the United States, or particularly in present-day Ecuador, Colombia, and
Venezuela. At times, in the narratives, the botanists, zoologists, geographers, geol-
ogists, or cartographers have been highlighted even more than the processes and
results they got. Many works have been descriptive, compilations, with hagiographic
and uncritical ingredients, although this changed since the 1980s. National
approaches have predominated, and very few have been comparative. Connected
history exists in works about actors who explored territories beyond the national
level. Authors such as Diana Obregón or O. Restrepo have argued that the descrip-
tive approach served to local scientists to justify themselves and to find – or perhaps,
rather invent – a tradition to hold on, especially in countries where there is, still
today, neither much appreciation nor understanding of the various edges of scientific
enterprises and its representatives. A few of those expeditions’ histories are consid-
ered here, as case studies, to analyze recent approaches.
Humboldt and Bonpland have been visited recurrently. Historians of science from
all perspectives raised by Cueto and Silva (2020) have been, at one time or another,
“Humboldtians.” His figure is transversal to countries and longitudinal in time. As in
the Darwinian case, there is a more modest, but anyhow robust, “Humboldt indus-
try” that extends to exhibitions, documentaries, films, and novels. His results
continue to be used, in a valid way, to analyze issues such as the altitudinal migration
of plants due to climate change. Another recurrent figure has been that of José
Celestino Mutis, self-appointed as “the oracle of the Kingdom” (Nieto Olarte 2006,
212–215), erected as the epitome of higher science in Colombian culture (somewhat
less so in Spain), where the Botanical Expedition to the New Kingdom of Granada
would be a “myth of origin” or a “ground zero” of science in that country (Obregón
1994, 541). There is also a successful “Mutis industry,” mainly Colombian and to a
lesser extent Spanish, with dozens of academic texts that illustrate diverse aspects,
sources, and perspectives (Bernal Villegas and Gómez Gutiérrez 2010; Amaya 2005;
among many researchers including Olga Restrepo-Forero, José Luis Peset, MÁ
Puig-Samper, Thomas F. Glick, Francisco Javier Puerto Sarmiento, Luis Carlos
Arboleda, Daniela Bleichmar, Germán Amat-García, and Luis Palau-Castaño).
Diverse outreach products have also been produced, such as the exhibition Natural
History and Politics (see www.banrepcultural.org/historia-natural-politica).
Despite the more thoughtful contemporary critical reviews of Mutis, the hagio-
graphic vision continues. For example, in a study of the Spaniard as the third
myrmecologist there was in the world, the authors state that he should be regarded
nowadays as the “eighteenth apostle of Linnaeus” and that he was “an honest man,
privately as well as publicly,” who “operated strictly on the basis of the phenomena

he could personally observe” (Wilson and Gómez Durán 2010, 20). These assertions
are at the antipodes of what is suggested by researchers such as Nieto Olarte (2006),
who names him as an “agent of the empire,” or Fernández (2019), who doubts his
integrity to give truthful information due to his interests around the commerce of
quinine.
The critical views of Mutis have been accompanied by highlights of the relevance
of Creoles. For example, it has been pointed out that there is no evidence that Juan
Bautista Aguiar, Francisco Antonio Zea, or Sinforoso Mutis (nephew of José
Celestino) had known the manuscripts on the flora of New Granada “that remained
for them as an arcane.” The payanés Francisco José de Caldas and the nephew
Sinforoso would have had access to such manuscripts only after the death of José
Celestino, in 1808, “and they were perplexed by the disorder and poverty of the
manuscripts” (Amaya 2000, 121).
Caldas was the director of the journal Weekly of the New Kingdom of Granada,
considered the first scientific publication in those territories. A profuse cartographer
and pioneer of biogeography, he was an important figure for his ideas on “plant
leveling,” which he developed before meeting Humboldt and Bonpland and working
with them for a few months in Quito and surroundings (Nieto Olarte et al. 2006). He
captured these ideas in maps like the one in Fig. 5, in a similar line to what Humboldt
published later as “plant geography.” That coincidence has been treated as misap-
propriation, synchrony, or simply obviated, opening interesting lines of analysis
Fig. 5 Profile of the Andes from Loja to Quito. (Source: Francisco José de Caldas. In: Nieto Olarte
et al. (2006))

(Gómez Gutiérrez 2016; Valencia-Restrepo 2018; Cañizares-Esguerra 2006; Vila
2018/1960; Díaz-Piedrahita 2006; among others). Less critical versions, although no
less abundant, have been given to the relationship between science, power, and
imperialism of the Royal Botanical Expedition to Peru, visited by authors such as
Eduardo Estrella, Esther García Guillén, Antonio González Bueno, Raúl Rodríguez
Nozal, Oscar Muñoz Paz, or Francisco Pelayo, among others.
There have been reviews of the role of Humboldt and Bonpland, which question
their originality and lack of recognition of sources. Some actors obviated were
Caldas in matters such as the biogeography and the taxonomy of Cinchona, or the
Limean José Hipólito Unanue and other Creoles of that city, on the knowledge of
meteorology or, in general, their ideas on environmental decline and “environmen-
talist” thought. Informants were key for the pair of European travelers, and some-
times they let it be known, but without depth or full recognition (Cushman 2011;
Freites 2000). There are also less critical views, which highlight the Prussian’s
contributions to science or to political activity, such as the works of MÁ Puig-
Samper, Alberto Gómez Gutiérrez, Sandra Rebok, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Yajaira
Freites, Frank Egerton, and Stephen Bell, among many others. As is understandable,
fair assessments of the complete historiographies of scientific figures such as Hum-
boldt or Mutis fall far beyond the reach, aim, and scope of this chapter.
Natural products such as the Cinchona trees’ bark, considered the most signifi-
cant American contribution to universal pharmacopoeia, have drawn historical
attention throughout the centuries, up to the present day, with various polemics. A
controversy has been about whether or not the Indigenous knew its febrifuge
properties. Some decades ago, Estrella (1995) showed the role of local connoisseurs
for the knowledge of plants, and Ortiz Crespo (1994), after working at the Vatican
archives, gave important sources to ratify that the Indigenous knew their medicinal
properties.
There is a growing body of work on local peoples, as the herborizations and
botany classes of José Mejía Lequerica, or the lesser-known participation of Viceroy
Caballero y Góngora, the Baron of Carondelet, or the Creole Juan Eloy Valenzuela y
Mantilla in proposing the teaching of botany in present-day Ecuador and Colombia.
There are several texts on Francisco Zea’s works in Bogotá, or on the creation of a
chair of botany in Lima in the eighteenth century. These works, whether descriptive
or analytical, share the intention of revealing individuals that were buried in the past
under the shadow of Humboldt, Mutis, and others.
Many of the aforementioned works can be inscribed in views that leave behind
diffusionist, uncritical, and crystallized frameworks on “center/periphery” relations.
Without denying the asymmetries, the new perspectives introduce actors tradition-
ally discarded or made invisible. The hagiographic chorus of great figures has
gradually vanished. There are still ingredients not only of diffusionist perspectives,
but also of “international networks and new social actors,” such as the analysis of the
Flora Huayaquilensis, discovered by the physician and historian of science Eduardo
Estrella in the archives of the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid (Estrella 1989).
That work was made by the hitherto badly known botanist Juan José Tafalla, part of
the Botanical Expedition to the Viceroyalty of Peru, but it lay buried for almost two

centuries. It demonstrates the gap between collecting in the field and processing
materials in the cabinet or museum, an argument at times used to propose that in
reality those expeditions have not ended. Because of this case and others (such as the
archives on Bonpland’s latter research in southern South America), it cannot be
discarded altogether the existence of novel and dramatic sources on unknown and
even very visited topics. Also in the line of “international networks,” but also of
“global turn,” there are studies on relations between Latin America and the United
States mediated by explorations, disciplines, collections, publications, or other forms
of circulation of science (Cuvi 2011; Quintero Toro 2012; among others).
There are renewed views on national processes, even from foreign authors. In
Colombia, the deficit model perspective has been questioned by more critical and
pondered versions (Appelbaum 2016; Bleichmar 2012). There have also been
approaches to iconographic sources, painters, and illustrators by other authors such
as Nancy Stepan, O. Restrepo, Elisa Garrido, Pablo Diener, Alexandra Kennedy,
Mariana Zinni, and Carmen Sotos Serrano. It is considered that the natural history of
colonial America was embedded in a “visual epistemology,” as “knowing and
making visible were inextricably intertwined” (Bleichmar 2012, 6). A splendid
sample of some drawings produced during the Botanical Expedition to the New
Kingdom of Granada is available at http://www.rjb.csic.es/icones/mutis/.
Many studies on explorations have been produced from Spain, with access to
archives such as the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid or the General Archive of the
Indies in Seville. In that country there have been several programs, as one on the
Globalization of Science and National Culture, under the framework of reception
and diffusion, the most influential in the 1990s, but at the same time critical of it
(Lafuente et al. 1993). There is a profuse literature on the botanists around the Royal
Botanical Garden and their quarrels, partly related to the botanical expeditions of the
late eighteenth century, commercial interests, and power; two emblematic characters
of controversial relations were Casimiro Gómez Ortega and Antonio José
Cavanilles, also related with Francisco Antonio Zea. Other historians are Diana
Soto Arango, José Antonio Amaya, Francisco Javier Puerto Sarmiento, and Antonio
González Bueno.
Finally, there are several works that fit into the “global turn” perspective,
connecting the Atlantic world, such as Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Jorge Cañizares-
Esguerra, Mauricio Nieto Olarte, Santiago Castro Gómez, Neil Safier, María
M. Portuondo, and Judith A. Carney, among others. This perspective has enriched
the understanding of these processes, by opening up new veins of analysis that
surpasses national approaches.
There are many other works that fall between several of the mentioned perspec-
tives and that are not detailed here. Some are descriptive, although they do survey
local networks and actors. Several are about institutions, professions, characters, or
paradigm shifts in the life sciences, as from natural history to biology and ecology, or
on the role of ecologists and biologists in institutionalizing conservationism, or the
emergence of fields within biology, etc.

Evolutionism in Tropical America
The circulation of Darwinist ideas in tropical America has been studied in greater
detail for Bolivia and Colombia. There is also research about episodes in Peru,
Ecuador, Venezuela, Panama, and Costa Rica. In all these places, national actors
were connected to the theory through publications coming from Europe or the
United States, lectures and classes by scientific travelers, and local publications
containing translations or analyses by doctors, naturalists, lawyers, politicians,
students, historians, geographers, geologists, theologians, priests, and philosophers.
Most studies have relied on printed sources. Fundamental scenarios of the debates
around evolutionism were universities, high schools, scientific societies, pulpits, and
printed, informative, and specialized media. In this topic, the communities of cities
and countries were, as far as is known, disconnected from each other. As a result,
there were singular processes conditioned by political, national, and local conditions.
More marginally, Darwin and his evolutionist colleagues maintained contact with
some correspondents in America.
The circulation of Darwinian-evolutionary ideas in the American tropics occurred
basically since the 1870s. Under names such as “doctrine of descent” or “trans-
formism,” Darwinian ideas were unfolded, diffused, appropriated, signified,
resignified, replicated, or misrepresented in various ways. They had greater reso-
nance in the framework of philosophical, theological, and ideological disputes,
which intermingled biological evolutionism with sociopolitical or cultural analyses.
For this reason, it is considered that the circulation in the region was, above all, in the
form of “social Darwinism,” which refers to the use in nonscientific spheres of ideas
such as struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, adaptation, selection, and
extinction (Argueta Villamar 2009). It has been argued that in Colombia, for
example, one could not allude to a “scientific” or “biological” Darwinism, because
it was especially social: “long before the fiction of a social Darwinism completely
separate from the uncontaminated Darwinism of nature was invented, the followers
of Darwinism in Colombia as elsewhere had already discovered its multiple possible
uses and its dangerous associations” (Restrepo Forero 2009, 37). In contrast, the
ideas of the English naturalist were more slowly incorporated in the realm of
scientific practices in the twentieth century, which were changing from natural
history to biology (Puig-Samper 2019, 219).
Given that the tropics host large Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations, in
addition to whites and creoles, many debates were around races and the origin of
humanity. Denials and extreme defenses of miscegenation were common ground.
Darwinism also gave space to debates about conceptions of society, social classes,
freedoms, social evolutionism, degeneration and regeneration, competition/solidar-
ity/communalism, economy, politics, religion, science, animal husbandry, medicine,
psychiatry, eugenics, acquired traits, monogenism/polygenism, bodies, food,
hygiene, biopolitics, immigration, common ancestor, fixism, transformism, teleol-
ogy, and design.
In many cases, evolutionism was known and interpreted through the texts or
readers of Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel, or other popularizers. These diverse

readings led to an eclectic framework, with ingredients of Lamarckism, Haeckelian
monism, and Krausism, among others (Puig-Samper 2019; Glick 2013; Ruiz Gutiér-
rez 2019; Restrepo Forero 2009; De la Vega 2002; Argueta Villamar 2017). It was
also coupled with interpretations of positivist ideas, and disputes between Spence-
rianism and Comtism, as in Bolivia (Démelas 1981; Argueta Villamar 2009). All
these are in a framework of struggles between liberals and conservatives, religious
and anticlericals. Many individuals took positions of evolutionary theism, such as
Manuel José Pérez in Panama, Teodoro Wolf in Ecuador, or José Marabini in
Bolivia. Those conciliatory positions may have been more effective to oppose the
theory than tenacious and bitter confrontations, which also existed.
In present-day Panama, a province of Colombia in the nineteenth century, the
major controversies, traceable in translations of foreign texts and contributions of
local actors, were about the origin of humans. Only in 1925, a writing on biological
evolutionism appeared, by Federico Calvo, professor at the National Institute (Pruna
Goodgall 2013; Villarreal and De Gracia 2017). In Bolivia, the first popularization
text appeared in 1877, associated with Haeckelian transformationalist thought. The
struggles between conservatives and liberals were combined with conflicts with
Indigenous and border problems. As in Colombia, Darwinian ideas in Bolivia
were accepted and disseminated by anticlerical liberals, who used them for discus-
sions about society. Among the few situated in a scientific research framework,
although in a partial way, were the geographer Luis Crespo and the physician
Belisario Díaz Romero, who acted through geographical societies and bulletins
since the end of the nineteenth century. Díaz had controversies with the religious
Marabini. Several Bolivian popularizers were associated with Masonic lodges, high
schools, and universities; one place that concentrated several of them was the
Literary Circle of La Paz (Argueta Villamar 2009). Only since 1913, transformism
began to be taught.
Less is known about Peru, a matter that would respond to the lack of spectacular
debates, except for the one between the Catholic Church and the physician Celso
Bambaren. The Italian geographer and geologist Antonio Raimondi alluded to
Lamarck in 1857 and, in 1874, quoted Darwin to briefly explain the evolutionary
controversy, without taking sides, perhaps due to a lack of understanding of the
subject. One of his disciples at the San Marcos University, the physician and
naturalist Miguel Colunga, explained Lamarck’s classification system through the
chairs of Medical Natural History, Zoology, and Botany. In the twentieth century,
evolutionary thought influenced studies on high-altitude physiology and discussions
on the racial question (Cueto 1999).
In Ecuador, the first known circulations were in charge of Teodoro Wolf, who had
a solid background in evolutionism and had incorporated it as a theoretical frame-
work for his research and reasoning. His first diffusion was through the lessons he
gave, beginning in 1871, at the Polytechnic National University in Quito. He taught
and debated the transformist doctrines in his geology and paleontology classes,
situated in a position of evolutionary theism. The uniqueness of Quito is that
Darwinism was spread by a Catholic Jesuit. However, his conflicts with other
local religious, for those classes and other differences, made him leave the university

and the Jesuit Order in 1874. For example, his request to travel to the Galapagos was
rejected by the Vatican because it could be harmful to his religious spirit. Evolu-
tionism in Ecuador remained in some syllabi, and there were public polemics
between religious and laics, and it was only more discussed and incorporated after
the Liberal Revolution of 1895, reaching scientists such as Luis Sodiro, the influen-
tial Jesuit botanist who had immigrated along with Wolf (Cuvi et al. 2014, and other
articles from these authors). Later on, in the Ecuadorian context, there were also
several debates around the Galapagos archipelago, on geology and biological evo-
lution, involving Europeans, Northamericans, and also an Ecuadorian scientist,
Misael Acosta Solís.
Universities were the main scenarios of debate in Colombia, as well as profes-
sional societies, salons, literary gatherings, books, university and student newspa-
pers and gazettes, novels, poems and pamphlets, theses, public lectures, magazines,
and minutes of professional and literary societies. University students were very
active, at a time of struggle for the educational model and control of educational
institutions at all levels. The first appearance in university programs and student
speeches was in 1868, with no real incorporations in research programs. In the
1880s, the Swiss professor Ernst Röthlisberger explained at the National University
of Colombia the systems of Laplace and Darwin, for which he was criticized by the
conservatives. After 1886, with a more conservative leaning in society, discussions
were less visible. According to Restrepo Forero (2009, 31), Colombian naturalists
“sympathized with Darwinian ideas, without producing much noise. They were
cautious in their use, and participated little in public debates openly in defense of
Darwinism, although they did participate in polemics related to races, immigration
and other equally important issues.”
In Venezuela, it was also a German, Adolf Ernst, the capital figure in the early
circulation of Darwinism, who founded the Society of Physical and Natural Sciences
of Caracas and directed the National Museum, from where he divulged Darwin and
Haeckel. References to the naturalist appear in the minutes of that Society since
1867. Ernst taught, from 1874, Lamarck’s “transformism” and Darwin’s “natural
selection” through the chair of Natural History in the Central University of Venezu-
ela. He was Darwin’s correspondent between 1880 and 1882. In 1893, Pablo Acosta
Ortiz, professor of anatomy, introduced modern anatomy following Darwinian
norms. There were later polemics that had, among their protagonists, the Caracas
native Luis Razetti, who succeeded Acosta in the same chair in 1896. In 1904,
“Razetti maneuvered the Academy of Medicine into a statement of public support
for evolution by introducing a motion in such a way that the members had a choice of
voting in favor of the motion or declaring themselves unscientific ideologues” (Glick
2013, 262).
In the twentieth century, there were more actors defending the theory, such as
Misael Acosta Solís in Ecuador or the Venezuelan physician Rafael Villavicencio.
There were also new polemics, for example, in Costa Rica, where two professors
who taught evolutionary theory in a school were publicly attacked by religious
people (Molina Jiménez 2001).

Historiography of Evolutionism
Although the history of evolutionism would have received excessive attention in
several places, along with genetics, molecular biology, and bacteriology (Meunier
and Nickelsen 2018), in Latin America it is more recent. More tradition and attention
have been posed on explorations. Still, some syntheses exist (Glick 2013; Argueta
Villamar 2017; Puig-Samper 2018, 2019; Ruiz Gutiérrez 2019; among others).
Those syntheses tend to be dominated by approaches on countries such as Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Spain, and Mexico; only Puig-Samper (2019) gives certain
details on all – Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Panama. Almost nothing is known
about most Central American and Caribbean countries (with the notable exception
of Cuba), nor about Paraguay, which would be the “only country in the region where
there was no debate over Darwin’s work in the nineteenth century” (Glick
2013, 259).
There are works in the form of books, journal articles, and proceedings of
academic meetings. Of particular importance are the dozens of studies compiled in
the proceedings of the eight Colloquia on Darwinism in Ibero-America, organized
regularly since 1997 by the International Network for the History of Biology and
Evolution, with Rosaura Ruiz Gutiérrez and M. Á. Puig-Samper as outstanding
figures. In contrast to explorations, there are fewer works in languages other than
Spanish, with the notable exception of those on eugenics, not analyzed in this
chapter.
The historiography of Darwinism in the American tropics, written locally and
since the 1980s, has had three main influences: the constructivist turn, with a focus
on issues such as locality and controversies; the ideas of reception and introduction;
and a focus on “social Darwinism.” There have also been many exploratory and
more descriptive works. The studies have been, above all, of national or subnational
scale, through the analysis of published works, individuals, institutions, classes, and
polemics. As happens with scientific explorations of the past centuries, the emphasis
has been on national actors and histories, partly because the national sources of
financing are oriented to build national narratives, partly because of the difficulty
there has been to create and maintain national and international societies, partly
because the costs of travel to foreign archives in the region. The only comparative
approach that considers tropical countries is between Mexico and Bolivia (Argueta
Villamar 2009), and the most complete synthesis is that of Puig-Samper (2019).
There are gaps in connected history. Although there is information on the relations of
each country with Europe and the United States, almost nothing is known about the
relations of tropical countries with each other, or in broader networks.
In the region, as in the rest of the world, Darwin has not only been the object of
elegies, but has also been criticized provoking constant controversies. This is not
unexpected, as it has been a constant since the first dissemination of his ideas, with
events such as the well-known controversy between Samuel Wilberforce and
Thomas Huxley in England. Most stories about Darwinism have had an emphasis
on controversies involving the binomials science/religion, liberalism/conservatism,

atheism/Catholicism, materialism/idealism, and less for theoretical aspects, as
between Lamarckism and Darwinism.
The research on the reception of Darwinism as a phenomenon in Latin America
was inaugurated by Thomas F. Glick, when he included, in a compilation of works
on comparative reception in 1974, an analysis of Mexico made by Roberto Moreno.
In the revised preface to that book, 15 years later, he explained that many new
national studies had appeared (Glick 1988). He analyzed Cuba, Uruguay, and Brazil
and continued to use the framework of “reception” for Darwinism and other scien-
tific ideas. This idea of reception relates with “the use of concepts such as evolu-
tionism, natural selection, and adaptation by journalists, politicians and ideologists”
(Argueta Villamar 2017). It is an analytical model to determine the fortune of
scientific ideas when they cross cultural boundaries. For example, there has been a
focus in “the interested landing of evolutionism in the social world and its diverse
political use by the bourgeoisie and the workers’ movements” (Puig-Samper 2019).
Until today, many works illustrate the individuals that receive the ideas, the contexts
in which they use or mention it, the currents of thought to which they respond, and
the areas of discussion and application (Ruiz Gutiérrez 2019).
The reception approach has been intermingled with that of “introduction,” to
allude to the use of Darwinism to explain biological phenomena, as well as to
explain why it was not used immediately, or with delay, as a biological theory: “is
the use of those same terms by doctors, biologists, agronomists and other profes-
sionals that employ such concepts in their professional practice to better explain the
processes that they study” (Argueta Villamar 2017, 94).
Reception and introduction have been categories widely welcomed, although
they have also been questioned, partly because they can be interpreted as a diffu-
sionist approach in the style of Basalla, also because it has been argued that
“reception cannot be divided in societies in which the scientific and the social/
political facets were closely linked” (Restrepo Forero 2002). The recurrent idea
that Darwinism in Latin America in the nineteenth century was, above all, social is
supported by the fact that, as far as is known, only in Brazil and Cuba there were
Darwinian programs in biology in the nineteenth century in a “introduction” style,
and in Uruguay one associated with cattle breeding. Among other things, that would
have been used as “evidence of a defective cultural and educational structure” (Glick
2013, 259).
Positivism in the region was very influential, and its relation with evolutionism
raises debates. Glick (2013) alerts that the perspective of analysis that has linked the
reception of Darwinism with positivism would have slowed down the investigation
of “scientific Darwinism.” Puig-Samper (2019) adds that some studies would have
been influenced “by an erroneous point of view about the influence that positivism
had on them.” Glick is correct in stating that emphasis has been placed on the search
for relations between positivism and evolutionism, sometimes indistinguishable and
eclectic in Latin America, also in saying that positivism was a term that comprised
different understandings. Some historians have debated whether it was Comtean or
Spencerian positivism. According to Ruiz Gutiérrez (2019), in practically all

countries, it was the “Spencer’s version,” especially Lamarckian, that was known,
which would have favored assimilation between lawyers and physicians.
Conclusions
In the last 40 years, there has been an important professionalization and institution-
alization of the history of science in the American tropics, especially in Bogotá, with
more isolated initiatives, although of important depth, in Caracas, Quito, Lima, or
Medellin. That institutionalization has helped to broaden the approaches, as critical
perspectives have been added to the descriptive, compilatory, and hagiographic ones.
Since the 1980s, Creoles, Indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendants have appeared
in the histories. As a result, today their role is better known (although still with gaps)
in the process of construction of the complex edifice of science, acting as scientific
peers, guides, informants, painters, collectors, porters, animal caretakers, and cooks,
among others. This is a fruitful path of research. Also the regional and global
connections are better known.
Before the 1980s, there were several attempts to highlight “American science,”
especially pre-Columbian. This approach has diversified to more “radical” positions
that place American peoples as fundamental for the Scientific Revolution and
Enlightenment, also to narratives that pose in question the traditional accounts
about actors such as Humboldt or Mutis, highlighting their deliberate misappropri-
ation of knowledges, invisibilization of sources, or even information manipulation.
Those daring and uninhibited looks at classic problems/topics, which broaden and
pluralize views, are gaining ground due to their interpretative strength and relevance.
It is worth to note that this approach does not emerge only “from the tropics” as a
resistance to traditional histories: It is also present in studies made “from outside” but
with less Eurocentric views, embracing a less “basallist” view.
The influence of STS studies and constructivist methodologies and styles has
been key to attain those critical approaches. Also many people have received specific
academic training in the history of science, and the work with primary sources has
become more professional. The social, cultural, economic, and power ingredients
around local spheres are increasingly better understood. Categories such as imperi-
alism by invitation, civil plants, layers of colonialism, scientific missionaries, Creole
scientists, local and hybrid knowledges, relocation of science, and circulation of
knowledges have emerged, replaced, or reframed others such as conquest, center,
periphery, metropolitan, diffusion, and transfers.
Explorations have been a primary and favorite theme, revisited from many
perspectives, although many travelers still have not received much, if any, attention
so far. For example, there is little work on the activity of the religious missionaries, in
contrast to the global and local “Humboldtian industry” and “Mutisian industry.” In
the case of evolutionism, the narratives are more recent, quite influenced by a look at
diffusion and reception, and an emphasis on controversies and processes framed in
“social Darwinism.” The influence of Humboldt and Darwin has been such that
historians of science in the region, almost without exception, have been, to a greater

or lesser degree, Humboldtian, Darwinian, or both, even to oppose traditional
approaches on those actors.
A historiographic knot of importance and density has been generated around the
Cinchona trees. This natural medicinal product has generated knowledges at very
different levels, from the most traditional in the field to refined laboratory analysis.
Like the coca or the Andean seagull, the Cinchona trees connect the tropical Andes
and have aroused botanical, cartographic, commercial, and political interest from the
sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Its connections go beyond Europe and
America, as it was decisive for the European imperialist expansion in Africa
and Asia.
A national approach, sometimes nationalistic, has predominated in the narratives
since the nineteenth century. In each country, historians have investigated their
national contexts, even before nations existed. Mutis, for example, has been consid-
ered the ground zero or myth of origin of “Colombian science” (although he was a
Spaniard working in an imperial Viceroyalty, loyal to the Spanish crown, unlike
many of his disciples who became independentists). There is a lack of comparative
studies, let alone connected regional approaches. Several works connect the tropical
countries with the Global North, but few connect the tropical countries with each
other in the studies on explorations, almost nothing around evolutionism. The
reasons for these gaps, even with so much material available, have not been
researched. In the interviews, issues like financing to travel, national funders’
interests, and the prevalence of connections of local historians, with their peers in
the Global North (where many of them went to study) rather than with their
neighbors, were raised.
Botanical explorations of the nineteenth century have been one of the most visited
themes, followed by geological, geographical, zoological, and multidisciplinary
explorations. These stories illustrate the complexity of traveling, exploring,
collecting, and mobilizing and show visions of the natural world that have not
always been known or systematized, much less recognized in traditional narratives
of discovery and exploration. As the representation of America was visual in many
ways, iconographic sources have attracted increasing attention, illustrating funda-
mental devices in the process of knowledges’ circulation. This appears to be a
potentially fruitful path of research, as it means to leave aside the primacy of textual
sources of all kinds that have been the preferred ones in Western academic
approaches to the detriment of tacit knowledge, oral history, and landscape history,
among others.
A field or category seems to be emerging aimed at exploring a “scientific
revolution of the Atlantic.” It would bring together a set of works and a trend in
research, full of potentialities to rethink several conventional interpretations. The
characteristics of such a process would be its graduality, extension in time and space,
decentralized or blurred, perhaps even horizontal, empirical, without crucial exper-
iments, and therefore largely alien to great names and top individuals. Research
around this “in process” field or category would reinforce the interpretation that the
Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment took place over several centuries and

directly and indirectly involved, at least, four continents and a wide density of actors
little surveyed in mainstream research.
While studies on explorations cover, with overlaps, the four categories of Cueto
and Silva (2020), studies on Darwinism circulation in the tropical territories can
overall be situated in the first two, somewhat less in the third, and practically nothing
in the fourth. There are many compilatory and descriptive works in both fields,
necessary as a starting point. Many works still incorporate the categories of center-
periphery, but as in the Science and Technology in the European Periphery group,
they use them as “flexible and dynamic” (Nieto-Galan 2015), seeking to highlight
the agency of local actors and the forms that knowledges acquire when circulated in
local contexts. Cueto and Silva’s proposal for the historiography of science in Latin
America offers a stable view to understand the transformations in narratives and
approaches, although, as these authors warn, they should be considered as flexible.
Acknowledgments This chapter was prepared as part of the project “Historiography of Life
Sciences in the Tropical Andes,” IP 1059, sponsored by the Latin American Faculty of Social
Sciences (FLACSO Ecuador).
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