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Between 1804 and 1827, no fewer than six Greek students audited the lectures offered by the notorious evolutionist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), professor of zoology at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. However, none of them returned home to spread the French naturalist’s theory. Thus, it was left to Alexander Theotokis (1822–1904), a student of Henri Ducrotay de Blainville’s (1777–1850) at the Paris museum, to first introduce Greeks to the idea of organic evolution, in his book General Zoological Tables; or, Forerunner to Greek Zoology, published in 1848.1 Theotokis, who belonged to a well-known family from Corfu, presented three different schools of thought: immutability of species; immutability of species for the most part, but with possible changes in secondary characteristics ; and change based on the theories of Lamarck. Following Blainville, Theotokis preferred the second school and accepted that God created species. Perhaps because he never held an academic post or any other position of influence , Theotokis’s ideas did not have a significant impact in Greece.2 The first mention of the English naturalist Charles Darwin appeared in the Attic Calendar of 1869, a sort of almanac with articles of general topicality. In the entry “The Spoils of Pikermi,” the anonymous author wrote: “Apart from the great number of [fossil] animals discovered, the collection found in Pikermi gives force and scientific significance to the theory of Darwin on zoogeny.”3 In the years from 1855 to 1860, the French paleontologist Albert Gaudry had conducted excavations in fossil deposits dating from the Miocene at Pikermi in Attica . Darwin was aware of Gaudry’s research and mentioned the “discoveries of Attica” in both the Origin of Species (second edition of 1872) and The Descent of Man (1871).4 Gaudry’s excavations and the remains of strange animals found there had created a stir in Athenian society; so it is not surprising that the author of the Attic Calendar knew about Darwin’s theory and the relation of the Pikermi c h a p t e r f o u r t e e n Science and Religion in the Greek State Materialism and Darwinism Science and Religion in the Greek State 181 discoveries to this theory even before Darwin mentioned them.5 As professor at the University of Athens, Hercules Mitsopoulos had taken part in these digs in 1851, before the arrival of Gaudry, and had highlighted the “antediluvian” animals . The author of the article in the Attic Calendar also briefly and favorably presented Darwin’s theory on the “alteration of beings.”6 A few years later, in 1873, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Athens, Leandros Dosios, introduced evolution to the educated Athenian public in a lecture at the Parnassos Philological Society. We do not know if there was an immediate reaction to Dosios’s lecture, titled “The Struggle for Existence,” but three years later the first serious attack against evolution came from an assistant professor of the faculty of theology at the University of Athens, Spyridon Sougras , who wrote The Most Recent Phase of Materialism: Darwinism and Its Lack of Foundation, a polemical pamphlet against the threat of atheistic materialism.7 “From the start, the question of evolution or changes in animals and vegetables has attracted the attention of all scientists, because of its imbecilic and horrible results, meaning the common origin of man and the monkey,” wrote Sougras. “It also attracts religious interest, for theology ought also to be concerned with this question, since by its simple suppositions alone, it risks inducing error even among those who are totally ignorant of this theory.”8 Sougras strongly feared that Darwinian theory would push the Greeks toward socialism and communism , and in the sequel to his book he attacked Karl Marx and the German political activist Ferdinand Lasalle (1825–64). Sougras’s arguments were both philosophical and theological and were based on two intellectual qualities, morality and religious sentiment. In 1877, one year after Sougras’s book appeared, the professor of botany at the University of Athens, Spyridon Miliarakis, published a serialized biography of Darwin in the learned journal Estia, a biography issued as a small book in 1880.9 In the preface, Miliarakis criticized those who “make judgments and improvise discourses on everything, without ever studying the subject about which they are expressing conflicting opinions, as is the case with those who are opposed to the theories of Darwin.” Although a convinced Darwinian, Miliarakis proposed calling it a theory...

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