The Reception of Transformist and Evolutionist Theories in the Portuguese Scientific Community: the case of the Lisbon Polytechnic School

Description

This paper explores the presence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory in the context of two Portuguese higher education institutions, focusing on the second half of the nineteenth century. Even though Júlio Henriques’s dissertation Are species transmutable? (1865) is considered the first Portuguese academic work to explicitly defend Darwin’s theory, it was not an isolated effort. The allegiance to Darwin’s theory extended to Henriques’s colleague Albino Giraldes, and when both became full professors at the University of Coimbra around 1873, it is likely that they have taught it in their classes. In the same year, José Vicente Barbosa du Bocage was already discussing Darwin’s theory in his zoology classes at the Polytechnic School of Lisbon, despite maintaining a functionalist approach to the study of the animal kingdom. Recent researches are thus showing that the acceptance of Darwinian views in Portugal was more widespread than previously thought, especially in the Polytechnic School of Lisbon. Fernando Matoso Santos and Eduardo Burnay, who had studied philosophy and medicine at the University of Coimbra and succeeded Barbosa du Bocage as zoology professors, defended Darwinism as early as 1880. Matoso Santos, in particular, reorganized the curriculum of zoology from an evolutionary perspective in 1881, and this orientation persisted in the following decades. Such lack of resistance to Darwinian views from the Portuguese scientific elite constituted an exception in the European context and seems to have stemmed from strong Positivist and materialist conceptions connected to anticlerical and Republican tendencies present in the Portuguese academic elites.

Period	27 Oct 2011
Event title	1.º Congresso Luso-Brasileiro de História das Ciências
Event type	Conference
Conference number	1.º
Location	Coimbra, PortugalShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International