Special Issue: Heredity and Evolution in an Ibero-American Context

1. Introduction

The history of science within the Ibero-American context has not received significant attention from historians of science. In the case of historical studies of science in Spain and Latin America, research has primarily been carried out under the umbrella of “centers and peripheries,” indicating that despite their historiographical and epistemological importance, narratives on science within certain national contexts have analytical limitations. Recent research has indicated a need to reconstruct transnational stories that account for how knowledge produced in developing countries forms part of the circulation of international knowledge via international networks of collaboration. This perspective enables the production of narratives that extend beyond the national framework, engaging transnational participants and processes and permitting new ways of thinking about science history in national and regional as well as global settings. People, practices, and ideas, after all, are not geographically bounded, but move back and forth. They may envelope somewhat different contours when configured within different physical and sociocultural contexts.

The contributions included in this special issue each take a geographical approach toward analyzing the development of scientific practices and ideas by considering their place within different environmental, social, economic, and political contexts. All focus to varying degrees on different transnational concerns in Ibero-American science, filtered through the lens of the history of biology—specifically, a focus on questions related to heredity, genetics, and evolution. Each reveals, in one way or another, how science can be influenced by local patterns shaped by certain social, economic, and political circumstances, as well as by different institutional organization, in specific locales.

The contributions to this issue emerged from a session the editors organized for the 2017 meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science in São Paulo, Brazil. To complement the core papers that addressed heredity and evolution in Ibero-American biology, we asked additional authors to address similar themes. Among the eight papers included in this issue, several dominant themes emerged. Several papers address questions related to gender in science, both in terms of the impact of women’s contributions to biological research as well as, more generally, how gendered approaches entered into scientific discourse within particular national contexts. Gender, then, forms a major subtheme explored in different national contexts. Another subtheme that emerges is how model organisms selected for use in genetics research programs (especially species of Drosophila) became acclimated to the different geographic and social contexts in Spain and Latin America. With its tropical environments yielding rich and unique populations of different insect species, Central and South America, as well as Mexico, became loci for important fieldwork and research in genetics, and especially cytogenetics and population genetics. Drosophila thus features in three of the included articles discussing work on population genetics in Spain and Brazil.

The outcome of applying a geographic filter to our different subjects yields several interesting synthetic points to emerge that might otherwise be overlooked in papers published individually rather than collectively. As a whole, these contributions highlight how different contexts within the interactions in the flow of knowledge between Europe (especially Spain and Portugal) and North America were shaped by certain concerns, as well as organizational structures, of science in Latin America. This suggests the importance of considering national contexts when discussing research programs. For example, several authors note how different settings (both institutional and gender relations) framed research on population genetics in Brazil and Spain. Two of the articles illustrate how the public reception of scientific ideas (especially Darwinian evolution) and their appropriation within different national contexts were tempered by particular social contexts, examining the particular cases of Argentina and Mexico. Another exciting and unexpected result is how gender influenced the shape of both Latin American and Iberian life sciences in previously unrecognized ways. Despite the overall male-dominated global power structure of science and society, women researchers featured here were visible and influential figures in twentieth-century biomedical science, even though their presence has been hidden behind veils occasioned by marriage or institutional hierarchy. In addition, several authors illustrate how bonds of friendship...