From Man to Ape

“From Man to Ape is first and foremost a fascinating read and a mine of details about the history of Argentina and the development of scientific (and scientistic) thinking there, but it is also much more. It tracks the reception of Darwinian theory in an area ‘peripheral’ to Western Europe, and in so doing gives us in essence a Darwinian history of Darwinism, demonstrating how the tropes and representations that are the idioms of scientific knowledge were molded to the particular circumstances of Argentina and the cultural contingencies of a young society on the receiving end of modern science.  It also outlines more broadly and suggestively the relationship of biology to politics in the Latin American societies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where nation building was so closely tied up with questions of race, ethnicity, and modernization.”

“This attempt to track the reception of Darwin in Argentina is a clear invitation to rethink the models that still operate in the writing of history of science in Latin America, but also to question the concept of peripheral science.”

“This is an original and significant book that explores the reworking of Darwinian theory by Argentine thinkers in the second half of the nineteenth century and narrates the impact of Darwinism on the intellectual and social milieu of Argentina during that period. From Man to Ape is a sound piece of scholarly work, a well-researched and tightly argued book, which marshals quite an impressive amount of sources and deploys an engaging narrative to support a thesis which should be of interest to historians and philosophers of science alike.”­—Miguel de Asúa, Universidad Nacional de San Martín

“A tour de force. This is by far the most sophisticated book-length account of the reception of Darwinism in one country.”