Paper on Shores on Knowledge

The "New World" Evolution

From the arrival of the first Europeans to America, numerous descriptions of their nature, population, and events occurred in Europe. Joice Appleby begins the book Shores of Knowledge with Columbus and ends with Darwin. Appleby states that “the most significant consequence of the age of discovery is the awakening of curiosity among Europeans about the world in which they lived”. Many curiosities happened during centuries XV and XVI and were narrated by the conquerors like chronicles. The chronicles stand out because they were responsible for the formation of a repertoire of visions about America from perceptions, stereotypes, images and epistemological assumptions shared by European culture. Christopher Columbus, with his new technologies, discovered a continent - America - so rich in new creatures, peoples and natural products that transformed knowledge about the world forever. European contact with the new worlds of both the Atlantic and the Pacific provided the stimulus for a new mentality conducive to the growth of science such as Darwinism and researches of race and gender in the eighteenth century shaped human diversity and showed that white educated men were equal to women and blacks

The chronicles were structured from two great narrative axes - that of nature and that of culture. In this purpose, they began with a natural history, with descriptions of physical and geographical character, in which the earth, its climate, hydrography, relief, natural resources, fauna and flora were spoken. The descriptions of nature were grounded in the conception of nature as the principle of life and movement, being among all things the oldest and most venerable, since God, its Creator, had created it first as man. Nature, the enchantment of the forests, animals and lands recorded in the chronicles, expressed the potentialities of the New World. With a directed look, the chronicler selected information, constructed a scene, exaggerated in color, under a bias that was called "civility", of "soul saviors." And so, the tensions between rational and marvelous, secular and religious thought, the power of God and the Devil, good and evil, marked the diverse conceptions of the New World. Therefore, from the earliest times of the Conquest of Columbus and through the use of writing and other devices of power, Europeans have observed and constructed American reality in the likeness of their own.

Centuries later Charles Darwin would go from continent to continent, from island to island in search of his Theory of Evolution of Species to explain the evolution of life on Earth. Darwin contributed significantly to the question of species living on our planet. However, his quest for answers was an arduous and time-consuming job. In 1831, Darwin boarded the ship H.S.S. Beagle for a series of trips around the world. The adventure has lasted 57 months, and Darwin could do several surveys as a naturalist. When he stopped at certain points, he made surveys about fauna and flora. In Patagonia, he made excavations and found fossils of several extinct animals. When he arrived in the Galápagos archipelago, he realized the island with “their closeness to, and separation from, South America, had created a unique environment” (Appleby). Also, he found a huge number of giant tortoises, and realized that each island had a characteristic fauna and different species of birds, turtles and lizards. In addition, the pressure exerted by the environment, in terms of climate has altered the most isolated populations of the islands. Thus, Darwin developed a way to explain this new mechanism of evolution, known as Natural Selection. The organisms that are most adapted to the conditions that the environment provides will survive and will be the majority. Darwin became adaptive of evolutionism in 1837, a few months after his voyage. In this way, he can understand the meaning of his observations for the area of ​​evolution and submit his work to several scholars in the field. Appleby who started with Columbus and ends with Darwin states that “studying natural phenomena became an activity defining western modernity while loosening the hold of religious dogma over scientific inquiry.”

It is important to remember that with the discovery of the New World, Europeans began to have new concepts such as races and genders.

Londa Schiebinger comments her article "The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science" that based on a vision of human hierarchy, some proposals would be elaborated as human diversity. Schiebinger says “as evidence mounted that women and blacks lacked native intelligence, proponents of equality collected examples of learned European women and learned Africans”. This human diversity given by nature would justify other distinctions, based especially on the division of labor. The distinctions of class and status, rather than abolished, should be valued, and here the differentiation of members of society would ensure their progress. On the basis of this conception is elaborated a scheme in which the white, civilized, European man would represent evolutionary maturity in contrast to the woman and blacks, the primitive and the "non-European. Even though that was not the truth, Appleby mentions that even being equal to the “white educated man”, the universities would only accept blacks of either sex and white women just in the nineteenth century or even later. Appleby concludes saying that equality for Africans and women was not an ethical issue and yes anatomy.