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An early start to the Darwin Bicentennial (1809-2009)

How Panama and Latin America reacted to Darwin's theories

by Eric Jackson

In two years the scientific world will celebrate two noteworthy anniversaries, the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's 1809 birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his principal work, Origin of the Species.

Darwin's theories are still religiously and politically controversial, especially in countries like the United States where religious fundamentalists who uphold scriptural creation stories against conflicting knowledge and hypotheses about evolution. In the world of science, Darwin's life work has mostly been upheld, and particularly so to the extent that he postulated that the fittest adaptations of one species to a new environment tend to prosper and evolve into new species while the less fit tend to die out and go extinct.

Darwin's theories, particularly about human ancestry, have been popularized and in many cases distorted. Preachers who don't like evolution are wont to protest that they're not descended from monkeys, which Darwin never suggested. Rock bands have posed as throwbacks to extinct hominids (the Troggs) or as the products of degenerate post-human evolution (Devo). Politicians beholden to the religious right have attacked the teaching of evolution in the public schools and federal funding for scientific research.

But the current fame and controversy that surrounds Darwin's name in our time has not been a constant for the past century and a half, Cuban science historian Pedro Pruma reminded an audience composed mainly of biologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's Tupper Auditorium. Outside of Victorian England and circles of the scientifically educated, Dr. Pruma, noted, much of the world paid little attention to Darwin's teaching until it came front and center in a celebrated 1925 court case. "Darwin's theory of man's origin in Africa only became generally accepted after the exposure of the Piltdown Man as a fraud in 1953," he added.

The complete works of Charles Darwin are now available online and Pruma did a computer search of them that yielded 74 uses of the word "Panama." Some of these were references to the beauty of Panama's coasts, or to the Panama hats that are made in Ecuador or otherwise scarcely relevant to scientific matters. But nearly half of the allusions to Panama, many of them found in Darwin's correspondence with other scientists, were found to pertain to scientific questions.

These pertain mainly to Panama's role as a barrier between oceans, and both as a land bridge and barrier. In later editions of Origin of the Species he noted the work of other scientists about the differences and similarities among the marine fauna of South America's east and west coasts, and well before geologists discovered plate tectonics and continental drift proposed that there must have been a gap that the present isthmus of Panama plugged.

Subsequently it has been demonstrated that most of Panama arose from shallow seas as a volcanic archipelago, then drifted to plug a gap between continents about three million years ago. The biological and climate change implications of that long ago process are still hot topics in several fields of scientific inquiry.

And if Darwin took some notice of Panama, what are the particulars of the reverse? Pruma could have gone to the morgue at La Estrella, which was founded in 1853, in search of how, when and to what extent that paper and its English and French editions of the 19th century paid attention to Darwin. He might have made a painstaking search through the papers left behind by isthmian intellectuals of the 1800s. He didn't do it, however, because he said that's something that ought to be done by somebody in Panama rather than a scholar who lives and works in Havana.

But Pruma did research the reception of Darwin's ideas in Latin America, including in Panama, in the 20th century.

Early in the 1900s, an Argentine intellectual better known as a philosopher and champion of university autonomy, José Ingenieros, embraced much of Darwin's teaching but added his own variations. Other Argentines hypothesized humanity's origins in Argentina, with ancestral roots in South American primates.

(This was not so bizarre then as it may seem now, Pruma pointed out. "The French had their Cro-Magnon, the Germans their Neanderthal," and it was a popular nationalist conceit that humanity arose in the country of the person considering the subject.)

Ingenieros died young in 1925, and whatever spin he may have put on the Latin American concept of Darwinism was overwhelmed that same year by the trial in Dayton, Tennessee of high school biology teacher and American Civil Liberties Union member John T. Scopes. The world press converged on the town largely because two of the most famous lawyers of that time, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, squared off as special prosecutor and defense counsel respectively. After a country judge refused to accept any of Darrow's experts as witnesses, Darrow made and the judge allowed a most unusual courtroom maneuver, the calling of Bryan as a hostile defense witness and expert on creationism. That interchange grabbed world headlines and has since been celebrated in books, plays and films. Scopes was convicted and fined, but the Tennessee Supreme Court voided the conviction on a technical point. The trial sullied the reputation of fundamentalist religion in the mainstream of American culture, leading that current in society to decades of relative cultural and political isolation until it emerged as a powerful player in the conservative movement that brought Ronald Reagan to power in 1980.

And here, too, intellectuals paid attention to the Scopes trial and thus to the teachings of Charles Darwin. In 1925 Federico Calvo, a teacher at the Instituto Nacional, predicted that the trial would increase interest in Darwin and went on to explain evolution more in Argentine than Darwinian terms.

In 1959 the University of Panama celebrated the Darwin sesquicentennial and one of its professors, a Catalan named Santiago Pi i Sunyer, presented a paper on evolution that was serialized in La Estrella.

So what will Panama do for the sesquicentennial of Origin of the Species and bicentennial of Darwin's birth? Considering that there is some cutting edge research in evolutionary matters going on at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute here, there is bound to be some sophisticated discourse about the man and the subjects he broached. Because we have religious freedom and many different denominations and various strains within the dominant Catholic faith here, we will probably also hear scripture-based objections to Darwin's teachings. The extent to which Panama's schools and universities pay any attention to this will be one of the acid tests of educational quality here.

Nuevos Horizontes medical mission in Bocas
How Darwin's theories were accepted in Panama and the rest of Latin America

People's perceptions when they observe wildlife on Barro Colorado Island

New online registry of clinical trials