How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia?

A Historiographical Question

Gustavo Caponi

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
An Anomaly Entitled Filogenia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
What to Do with the Naughty Florentino? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
The Roots of Filogenia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Ameghino’s Darwinism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Abstract
The studies on the history of the science made in Latin America are usually
disinterested in epistemological questions. The analysis of the conceptual aspects
that rule scientific developments is left in the background, and the discussions and
reflections that these conceptual questions generate among the researchers
involved in such developments are seldom analyzed. It would seem that this
analysis lacks relevance; as if those discussions and reflections could only be the
distorted echo of reflections and discussions already better developed elsewhere.
A clear example of this is the relatively little importance given to Filogenia: that
ambitious programmatic work in which Florentino Ameghino explains the fun-
damental bases of Evolutionary Paleontology. This negligence not only conspired
against a correct understanding and appreciation of Ameghino’s own figure but
also prevented this work from being used as a document able to facilitate a clear
comprehension of the way in which the Darwinian Revolution impacted Paleon-
tology and Natural History in general.

G. Caponi (*)
Department of Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences, Federal University of
Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil
e-mail: caponi@cfh.ufsc.br

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 1

A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the
Life Sciences and Medicine,Historiographies of Science,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48616-7_5-1
2 G. Caponi

Introduction

Born in Lujan, province of Buenos Aires, on September 18, 1854 (Cabrera 1944,
10), Florentino Ameghino was the first Argentine scientist whose work got genuine
international recognition (Concerning the recognition achieved by Ameghino’s
researches, see: Moore (1920, 469); Piveteau (1961, 523); Simpson (1984, 79);
Bowler (1996, 409) and Podgorny (2005, 250). Nevertheless, in this respect, nothing
is more eloquent than the glowing review of Contribución al conocimiento de los
mamíferos fósiles de la República Argentina (Ameghino, 1889) that Cope (1891)
wrote for The American Naturalist). When he died in La Plata, capital of the
province of Buenos Aires, on August 6, 1911 (Cabrera 1944, 10), the results of his
researches on South American dinosaurs and fossil mammals were a significant
piece in the edifice of that Evolutionary Paleontology that had begun to be built after
the advent of Darwinism: an Evolutionary Paleontology which, both because of its
cognitive objectives and its guiding assumptions, was definitely Darwinian and not
just “evolutionist.” Nevertheless, despite the magnitude of his work, and regardless
of the international acknowledgment achieved by that work, the posterity was rather
ungrateful with Ameghino. Because of the overwhelming number of fossil genera
and species he identified and classified (Reig 1961, 78), Ameghino was always
valued as a stubborn and prolific fossil hunter (cf. Reig 1961, 76). However, at the
same time, it has been very common to portray him as somewhat confused, and
perhaps incoherent, as regards the theoretical foundations of his research.
This judgment, however, is not the result of a simple oversight. It is the symptom
of a limitation that usually afflicts a considerable part of the historical research
concerning the science produced in Latin America: the neglect of the epistemolog-
ical questions that can be relevant to understand the conceptual frameworks that
effectively guided the production of this science and determined its validation.
Negligence that, in Ameghino’s case, is especially striking, because far from being
unclear or careless, regarding those more general theoretical issues, Ameghino gave
them great importance, and this was reflected in Filogenia: principios de
clasificación transformista basados sobre leyes naturales y proporciones
matemáticas (Ameghino 1915[1884]) (The complete title of the work is Filogenia:
principios de clasificación transformista basados sobre leyes naturales y pro-
porciones matemáticas. That is: Phylogeny: principles of evolutionary classification
based on natural laws and mathematical proportions). This was an early program-
matic work, published in 1884, in which Ameghino exposes the theoretical objec-
tives and the more general methodological principles of Evolutionary Paleontology,
and its reading not only allow us to understand the insertion of his works in that
framework, but it also can help to appreciate the shock generated by Darwinism in
that disciplinary field.
Nevertheless, and unfortunately, that work had been very little considered by
those who dealt with Ameghino’s contributions; and that represents a pitiful misuse.
Such disinterest not only obstructed a thorough understanding, and a proper episte-
mological evaluation, of Ameghino’s work; but it also prevented Filogenia from
being used as a document whose relevance goes far beyond the understanding of a
How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia? 3

local development of Evolutionary Paleontology. In fact, this work was an effort to

understand the far-reaching changes that the Darwinian revolution was bringing to
Paleontology, and it was a successful effort that would deserve to be considered in
any interpretation of that abrupt transformation that the advent of Darwinism
generated in the whole of Natural History. From then on, this disciplinary field
becomes a genuine History of Nature, unified and oriented by the great theoretical
aim of reconstructing the tree of life (Bowler 1996), something that before On the
origin of species (Darwin 1859) was unthinkable and whose imposition triggered a
radical reorganization of Comparative Anatomy, Comparative Embryology, Bioge-
ography, Taxonomy, and Paleontology itself. Until that point, they had been sciences
of synchronic correlations, but from that moment on, those disciplines became
sciences oriented to reconstruct genealogical relationships. And it is that revolution-
ary reorganization that Filogenia enables us to understand.
Ameghino indeed focused on Paleontology, which he considered the leading
discipline of that “phylogenetic program” that, after Darwin, began to guide the
development of Natural History (The term “phylogenetic program” could be used in
contraposition with the term “adaptationist program” (cf. Caponi 2011). This latter
program was rather delayed in the Evolutionary Biology of the nineteenth century
(Caponi 2011). The main tasks of that Evolutionary Biology were the phylogenetic
reconstructions; that is: the development of the phylogenetic program). However,
Ameghino’s analysis allows us to understand, and to measure, the impact that
Darwin’s theses and proposals had in this whole disciplinary field. Filogenia, to
put it another way, shows how Darwin’s work leveraged the passage from that
Natural History whose main references were George Cuvier, Etienne Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire, and Richard Owen to that new Natural History whose great champions
were Ernst Haeckel, Carl Gegenbaur, Felix Anton Döhrn, or Edwin Ray Lankester.
Naturalists whose commitment to the phylogenetic program delineated by Darwin,
as Filogenia helps to see, could not be clearer. Reading it, no longer as a mere local
expression of an evolutionism imported from abroad, but rather as a movement
within a wider game involving a scientific community of transnational dimensions,
Filogenia allows not only to appreciate the importance of the role played there by
Ameghino, but it even allows to understand the rules of that entire game.
That is: to neglect the epistemological aspects of History of Science not only
precludes the complete understanding of the developments and results of the science
produced in Latin America, but it also inhibits the possibility of using those
developments and results for understanding the conceptual evolution of the disci-
plinary domains in which they find their foundation and validation. For this reason,
besides inquiring about the possible motivations for this neglect, here, Filogenia will
be considered as an example for showing the relevance that the study of the more
general theoretical features of the scientific knowledge produced in Latin America
may have. Insofar as it is inserted in a transnational production process, science
made in Latin America does not have to be considered as the delayed echo, or as a
mere replication, of what is thought elsewhere. On the contrary, it can and should be
considered as an active part of that process (cf. Barahona 2018). A process in which
4 G. Caponi

it obtains its intelligibility and its basis; and to whose legitimacy and general
foundation it contributes.

An Anomaly Entitled Filogenia

Florentino Ameghino is a clear example of how Latin American scientists have

developed their work by integrating themselves into a network of transnational
circulation of knowledge that provides them with a framework within which their
research made sense, also operated as a legitimizing instance of that work, and also
of the results arising from it. Furthermore, this legitimization, which is often
expressed as a clear and notorious international recognition, can also be taken as
an indicator of the excellence achieved by the science produced in Latin American
countries (cf. Cueto 1989, 29; 1994, 28). However, this transnational integration of
Latin American scientific communities often occurred in a way that deserves to be
mentioned. Not infrequently, and perhaps in most cases, this insertion and legitimi-
zation of researches developed by Latin American scientists have taken the most
general features of that “subordinated integration” pointed by Pablo Kreimer
(2006, 209).
Kreimer, it is true, appealed to that notion to characterize the regime, formally
established by international cooperation agreements, which today usually rules the
work of some research groups seated in Latin American institutions. In these cases,
says Kreimer (2006, 209), often an “international division of labor” prevails; and
there, the groups located in Latin America are assigned to “activities of high content
and technical specialization” that “are subsidiary to scientific and/or productive
problems already defined.” But, in some sense, that “subordinated integration”
whose hardest expression Kreimer (2006) points out in the current international
research networks, could also be glimpsed in other historical moments; even without
the existence of international cooperation agreements that formally set up such
division of the research tasks. It would be, rather, a spontaneous and informal
subordinated integration, resulting from how the research, from its beginning, is
projected and developed by those who conceive and execute it.
Under such “spontaneous subordination” and attending to different demands and
limitations proper to the context in which they develop their activities, scientists
working in Latin America, delineate and assume research projects that always
suppose the acceptance of conceptual and methodological coordinates previously
and elsewhere defined (Vessuri 1983, 17): a conceptual framework delineated, and
already legitimated, in countries whose scientific traditions and communities are
more consolidated and have already conquered more reputation (cf. Vessuri 1983,
16). Within this conceptual framework, not subject to controversy, the research of
these scientists located in Latin America finds its raison d’être, and it is also under
these theoretical references that the results of their research may be validated and
considered relevant. This conceptual conservatism, furthermore, is often reinforced
by the recurring demands for potential applicability that so commonly condition the
How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia? 5

researches carried out in less economically developed countries (Vessuri 1983, 16;
Cueto 2015, 21).
Thus, rarely at the forefront when it is a matter of conceptual developments, the
science made in Latin America always reached its higher level of excellence in the
exercise of normal science: solving “puzzles” whose approach assumes theoretical
coordinates, explanatory objectives, and also methodological ideals, already
discussed and defined elsewhere. In this sense, it is true, the science made in Latin
America does not differ from most of the science produced in the so-called central or
developed countries: the normality of science is always normal science. Moreover,
within this framework of normality, there is room for research of different degrees of
relevance and theoretical centrality: the puzzles to be posed can be more or less
fundamental, and their resolution can have a high theoretical impact. Bernardo
Houssay’s physiological research and Federico Leloir’s biochemical research, both
Nobel Prize winners (Cueto 1989, 29; 1997, 238), are good Latin American exam-
ples of this type of high-impact normal science (cf. Cueto 1994; Lorenzano 1994),
and it is also the case of Ameghino’s researches.
They are a typical case of that normal science developed under the regime of
“spontaneous subordinated integration.” Ameghino’s works on the fossil mammals
found in the Pampas region, and on the Patagonian dinosaurs, were considered
relevant because they followed the established methodological guidelines and the
cognitive objectives of Evolutionary Paleontology. But in addition to that,
Ameghino’s works also presented a characteristic that has often been a condition
that eases the transnational recognition of the science produced in Latin American
countries: they referred to evidence that could only be compiled in situ (cf. Vessuri
1983, 17–8). In other words, Florentino Ameghino’s works, not only could be
described as the specification of a program previously thought by European paleon-
tologists; but they also seem able to be considered as something that, at last, is not
very different from the observations and collections that a traveling naturalist, or an
opaque foreign correspondent, makes for the institutions of a scientific metropolis.
Thus, conceiving and carrying out his research, the Latin American scientist
would not be showing any merit of his own, nor would he be making a theoretical
choice worthy of mention or analysis; he would only be taking profit from his
closeness with something that, for a mere matter of distance, the scientists of the
metropolis could find difficult to study. The main scenario was elsewhere, and the
Latin American scientist was limited to taking advantage of his proximity and
familiarity with a secondary scenario, to see if, from there, he could add something,
even if it was a humble footnote, to that enterprise always led by others. And it is by
the tacit suspicion that this subaltern and marginal situation is the typical condition
of the science made in Latin America, that the historian usually addresses it. If
dealing with the effective production of knowledge resulting from this scientific
activity, the historian will examine the empirical results, giving very little importance
to the most fundamental theoretical options that can give meaning to those results.
Of course, all of this epistemological disdain is unjustified, but the fact is that it
seems to condition much of the literature regarding the science produced in Latin
America. In this literature, the analysis of the theoretical and methodological
6 G. Caponi

coordinates of the researches carried out by scientists established in Latin America

usually takes a second or third place; as if, regarding this topic, such researches were
not of much interest. This may explain the scarce consideration with which
Filogenia was treated by those who had dealt with Ameghino’s work. The fact of
assuming that the insertion of its author in the construction of Paleontology should
respond to a regime of subordinated, and even marginal, integration in a disciplinary
background already constituted and thought of by others, may have led to neglect
that ambitious theoretical work; even leading to the suspicion that there the only
thing to be found is an outdated jumble of misguided lucubrations, not too rigorous
and a little bizarre. That is to say, the classical portrait of Ameghino, which
represents him as a purely empirical scientist and somewhat negligent about the
theoretical foundations of his research, could come to prevail and to persist because
it fits with the idea that the excellence of the science made in Latin America only
depends on its efficiency and diligence in the development of research programs
already established and outlined in the so-called “developed countries.”
It must be said, however, that this devaluation of the work of Latin American
scientists is not simply a historian’s mistake. This depreciation reflects a presuppo-
sition of that international division of scientific work in which Latin American
science always seems destined to occupy a subordinate role. Within that order of
things, the humble and hard-working Latin American scientist appears to be the
executor of a program conceived by others. Thus, that scientist does not need to
think too much about the foundations of such a program: only what may be
necessary to perform efficiently the subordinate role of errand boy. Because of
this, the theoretical works of Latin American scientists do not seem to be too
interesting for their colleagues, and as a possible outcome of that, they do not
seem to be very relevant for the historian of science either. Everything would
indicate that those works are only the reverberation of something already said before
and with greater clarity. Moreover, if the function of the Latin American scientist is
to produce and organize data to be interpreted overseas, their incursions into the
analysis of the theoretical coordinates that would guide that interpretation can only
be of secondary interest.
Therefore, the fact that a book such as Filogenia was “less widely disseminated in
Europe and the United States than other works by Ameghino” was not, contrary to
what Julio Orione (1987, 453) said, “a strange coincidence”; nor it was due only to
the fact that its French edition was not published until 1919. The same is true for the
little attention that the historians gave to that work: Filogenia was not so considered
as other works by Ameghino because it was not an empirical work. It was nothing
that could be treated as the inventory and orderly description of irreplaceable
findings. Filogenia was the conception of a theoretical program, not its mere
execution. It was an ambitious theoretical and methodological work whose goal
was to outline the program to be followed by that Evolutionary Paleontology that
had begun to be articulated after the publication of On the Origin of Species, and the
fact that it has been written carries with it the assumption that that program was not
yet properly clarified and explained. Other naturalists from different countries were
already developing it, but it still seemed pertinent to make explicit the theoretical and
How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia? 7

methodological reference that guided their research. At least that was the view of a
young naturalist who was speaking from the end of the world.

What to Do with the Naughty Florentino?

Assuming a firm commitment with the program of an Evolutionary Paleontology

that was still being consolidated, Ameghino took up the cognitive objectives, the
conceptual basis, and the methodological guidelines that, to some extent tacitly, were
ruling the construction of that disciplinary field. For this reason, if this Paleontology
guided by the Phylogenetic Program is regarded as the theoretical framework of
reference, Ameghino may be considered as a normal scientist, who was engaged in a
new normality, still in the process of articulation, but whose contours were already
defined. However, despite this commitment, which would fit into the context of a
typical subordinated integration, Ameghino considered pertinent the realization of a
reflexive effort aimed to better elucidate and demarcate the theoretical assumptions,
and the methodological principles, involved in this new way of doing Paleontology.
A way of doing Paleontology, perhaps it is suitable to remember this, structured by
the Darwinian thesis according to which similarity is explained by common descent,
and guided by the goal of reconstructing the tree of life: the complete phylogeny of
all life forms (cf. Piveteau 1961, 515; Bowler 1996, 313; Buffetaut 1998, 75).
Moreover, Ameghino not only considers that this reflective effort was necessary,
but he decides to face it himself; and it is this presumption that prevents, or at least
makes it difficult, for Filogenia to fit well in the type of studies that are usually
dedicated to the history of the science made in Latin America. As it is the case,
however, of Contribución al conocimiento de los mamíferos fósiles de la República
Argentina (Ameghino 1889), or of other works like that. Filogenia is an anomalous
book and, if seen as its author, Ameghino ends up looking like a somewhat
anomalous figure. On the other hand, if he is considered as the author of the
Contribución, everything seems clearer: it is assumed that everyone understands
what Ameghino was trying to do there. The historian does not doubt about what can
be done with that work: the results there exposed may be summarized; the institu-
tional framework in which the research was developed may be analyzed; the
vicissitudes that accompanied that process are worthy of being narrated; and the
impact that the work had on the scientific community can be evaluated and weighed.
In that version, Florentino Ameghino looks more compatible with the standard of the
“good Latin American scientist.”
As in fact always happens with his brother Carlos, and perhaps this is what
explains that George Gaylord Simpson (1984, 75) seemed to feel more sympathy
and respect for the latter than for Florentino. The fact is not without some historio-
graphical interest. Carlos Ameghino [1865–1936] was indeed a tireless fossil col-
lector whose findings, besides having been decisive for the development of his
brother’s work, also contributed to the enlargement of the collections of the Museum
of Natural Sciences of La Plata (Reig 1961, 73; Simpson 1984, 60). Maybe it was for
this reason, because of his condition of judicious and modest field naturalist divested
8 G. Caponi

of any theoretical hybris unworthy of a South American scientist, that Simpson

tended to see more value in the humble figure of Carlos than in the pretentious and
controversial Florentino. That in Argentina there was a tendency to think of Carlos
Ameghino only as a secondary character in the biography of his celebrated brother
was, according to Simpson (1984, p.75), rather unjust. For Simpson, that certainly
was thinking in his double condition of paleontologist and historian of Paleontology,
the fossils discovered by Carlos Ameghino were more useful than the theoretical
reflections written by Florentino: Argentineans to the bones, that concepts are our
business. That is “subordinated integration.”
Here, it is also worth mentioning how this widespread way of considering the
work of Latin American scientists came into collusion with the hagiographic ways of
making the history of science that once prevailed, and persist, although more subtly,
in Latin America. Given the conditions of indigence, penury, and uncertainty, in
which science often develops in this region, the scientific profession was often seen
as a kind of epic, and even as a kind of laic apostolate. This is very common, above
all, in certain literature that tends to exalt those who, against all the difficulties, and
despite ingratitude and misunderstanding, were engaged in scientific activities.
There, sacrifice, perseverance, self-denial, and even obedience, are presented as
the greatest and most outstanding attributes of those scientists. Their excellence
would lie, not so much in intellectual virtues but above all in ethical virtues; which
can be seen in the various vicissitudes of a life as troubled as a scientist whose career
occurs on the poor side of town should always have.
For this reason, biographies of scientists like Ameghino abound (cf. Caponi 2017,
5 n. 17), and usually focused on ethical virtues, they pay very little attention to the
effective contribution to the advance of science that could have been made by those
long-suffering characters that are the Latin American scientists. Furthermore, the
ethical virtues are easily identifiable because they are manifested in anecdotes and
attitudes, and that explains the little care with the “intellectual virtues.” These are
always harder to identify because they are manifested in boring research results and
arduous scientific arguments. Things which understanding requires a general knowl-
edge of the area of research in which the scientist under study developed his activity;
but, above all, a precise knowledge of the problems that effectively guided the
scientific research developed in the period that it is pertinent to analyze. Thus, the
hagiographic enthusiasm, better or worse contained, of some biographers of Latin
American scientists ends up converging with the epistemological disregard often
inspired by the science produced under the regime of subordinated integration.
The truth, however, is that the neglect of the epistemological aspects of science
made in Latin America can be sustained without the complicity of those naive, and
obsolete, approaches to the History of Science. Concerning that, it is interesting to
see that, even when historians clearly and definitively overcome the hagiographic
approach, this is usually done to develop studies that do not focus on epistemological
questions either. This is the case, for example, of the profound and rigorous studies
that are being made on the institutional spaces in which research has been developed.
This topic, in the case of Ameghino and of the whole Argentine Natural History of
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has been brightly and exhaustively
How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia? 9

analyzed by Irina Podgorny (2005, 2009). But, even assuming this kind of approach,
most of the studies concerning the scientists working in Latin America seem to be
still marked by the tacit assumption that the conceptual developments that they could
eventually afford lack value and interest for an epistemological study. Thus,
approaches of cognitive sociology as the one that Dominique Guillo (2003, 16)
dedicated to the Pre-Darwinian French Natural History seem something whose wait
would be vain.
Furthermore, in the specific case of scientists whose work was linked to Evolu-
tionary Biology, this situation is also very influenced by the prominence always
given to the repercussion that evolutionary theses have outside the scope of scientific
circles. Thus, on many occasions, when the topics of the “introduction,” the “recep-
tion,” or the “appropriation” of Darwinism in Ibero-American countries are exam-
ined, the History of Science tends to slide into cultural studies that, in some cases,
border the picturesque. There, what is analyzed is not what a scientific community
did, or did not do, with Darwinism, as was the case in Yvette Conry’s (1974) famous
book on the introduction of Darwinism in France. In general, these studies prefer to
analyze how these scientific ideas were seen and interpreted in various exoteric
circles. Thomas Glick’s (1982) Darwin en España gave a great impetus to this type
of works, and among them, “social Darwinism” and eugenics were themes that
always occupied a central place.
Many of these studies seem to assume that, in certain countries, there were neither
groups nor individuals for whom Darwinism could be a guide and a path for the
development of genuine scientific work. Even when they speak about individuals
who developed researches oriented by the evolutionist perspective, it often happens
that such research is less examined than their discursive interventions in exoteric
circles. In the case of Ameghino, for instance, this explains the importance given to
works like “Mi credo” (Ameghino 1917a[1906]) and other writings similar to it. In
this perspective, the history of evolutionism becomes the history of an ideology; or
the history of a worldview. It becomes a history of “evolutionary thought”
(cf. Monserrat 1993), and not of an Evolutionary Biology that with more or less
brilliance, originality and amplitude, could be made in those countries. In this case,
science gets out of the picture and its place is taken by the ideological discourse, the
popularization, and the provincial enthusiasm of doctors, lawyers, journalists, pol-
iticians, and even apothecaries or priests, who are enthusiasts, or detractors, of
evolutionism.
The study of Darwinism in Latin America has received a great impulse thanks to
the international colloquia on Darwinism in Europe and America sponsored by
Rosaura Ruiz and Miguel Angel Puig-Samper. These meetings gave rise to a long
and valuable series of collective books that, up today, constitute an inescapable
reference for anyone who wants to research this subject (cf. Puig-Samper 2018). Its
pages, meanwhile, clearly reveal that limiting thematic: at least as far as Latin
America is concerned, most of the chapters are devoted to the cultural and ideolog-
ical impact of Darwinism. There is very little there on the impact of Darwinism on
the scientific communities and institutions of Latin American countries: little on the
institutional dimension of that impact and almost nothing on its epistemological
10 G. Caponi

dimension. In many cases, there, History of Science is conflated with a chapter on

the history of political ideas, ideological formations, and opinions in general.
Considering that, it is not strange that even the unhappy postulation of a South
American origin of man in which Ameghino, as is well known, incurred (cf. Caponi
2017, 161), seems to have raised more interest than Filogenia. That dead-end that
was Ameghinian Paleoanthropology (cf. Ameghino 1917b[1915]), very marked by
ideological questions and by the lack of any empirical support (cf. Caponi 2017,
205), seems to deserve more attention than the dense pages of that remarkable book
in which the whole way of making Evolutionary Paleontology is presented and
developed. A part of that ungrateful posterity of Ameghino, referred at the very
beginning, has to do with his unhappy speculations about the pampa origin of man.
Recently, for example, Miguel Angel Puig-Samper (2018, 20) reduced Ameghino’s
relevance to such theses. That is, Ameghino’s relevance is reduced to his less
rigorous and valuable works.
Fortunately, although widespread, the tendency to reduce the history of Latin
American Darwinism to Cultural Studies (Of course, this is not an impugnation of
the Cultural Studies of science. Science is also a cultural product; so, that approach is
very pertinent. The problem is not to see that this is only a possible approach; even in
the case of the science made in Latin America) has not taken space away from other
types of approaches. Not everything that has been done is reduced to insisting on the
ideological uses of Darwinism and evolutionism, and Podgorny’s works are a good
example of that. However, besides those works of Podgorny, it is not uncommon to
find many other works that are also devoted to the institutionalization of Darwinian
scientific researches in the different Latin American countries. Again, even in these
cases, there is a tendency to neglect the epistemological examination of the knowl-
edge whose institutionalization is being examined and nor rarely, the analyses that
are made in this works are based on epistemological suppositions that conspire
against the very accuracy of the institutional approach itself.
In Ameghino’s case, however, the magnitude of his work, and the recognition that
it achieved, have contributed to restraining that tendency. Leonardo Salgado (2011)
has made a very good job concerning the theoretical dimensions of Ameghino’s
work. Nevertheless, without dismissing his excellent works, and considering that
Salgado analyses are a valuable and unavoidable reference in the study of
Ameghino, Filogenia still deserves much more careful and epistemologically
better-grounded studies than those she has had so far. The conceptual axis on
which Ameghino’s best researches orbited continues without being properly esti-
mated and examined in its condition of theoretical and methodological work, and
also, in its condition of an eloquent document about the nature of that Evolutionary
Biology that developed in the five decades after 1859, and whose main objective was
the reconstruction of the tree of life (cf. Russell 1916; Bowler 1996; Caponi 2017).
How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia? 11

The Roots of Filogenia

Certainly, Filogenia justified the honoris causa doctorate that the University of
Cordoba conferred to Ameghino in 1885, shortly before assigning him the chair of
Natural History, his first position as a professional scientist (cf. Mercante 1936, 65).
However, it also justifies the fact that its author may be considered one of the
naturalists who most quickly and clearly understood the nature of the challenges
and changes that the Darwinian perspective brought to the science that Cuvier had
founded in the early nineteenth century. Cuvier’s Megatherium and Ameghino’s
Glyptodonts, although geologically speaking they have been embedded almost
simultaneously in the same ravines of Lujan River, their fossils are part of two
differentiated periods of the History of Paleontology. And Filogenia allows under-
standing the difference between both conceptual regimes. The first of them, the
Cuvierian, has to do with the very establishment of that discipline, and the second,
with the reformulation that the Darwinian Revolution imposed on it. In Cuvier’s
Paleontology, what mattered was to reconstruct the Megatherium, inserting it in a
Taxonomy based on organizational types (Caponi 2017, 61). Meanwhile, in
Ameghino’s Paleontology, what mattered was the insertion of glyptodonts in a
phylogeny (cf. Caponi 2017, 90).
The significance of Ameghino’s understanding of the impact of Darwinism on
Paleontology, and on all of Natural History, does not lie in the fact that such
understanding may come to express a picturesque Argentine singularity or a bizarre
appropriation of the scientific knowledge that can be taken as the peculiarity of a
“provincial science.” On the contrary, the pages of Filogenia show that the vast
empirical work carried out by Ameghino was guided by a clear understanding of
how Paleontology should be inserted within a Natural History reorganized by the
Darwinian perspective; contributing, in this way, to the development and definitive
consolidation of that evolutionary perspective. That is why the reading of Filogenia
may be so relevant for the History of Evolutionary Biology. The Argentine
Florentino Ameghino may be read as the British Thomas Huxley, the American
Edward Cope, and the French Albert Gaudry are read, and as far as certain topics are
concerned, with much more profit. Regarding several issues that are very relevant to
the historical-epistemological studies of the Darwinian Revolution, Ameghino was
much clearer than any of them.
That parity, however, cannot, and must not, raise too many eyebrows. Although
young when he wrote Filogenia, Ameghino was no longer a neophyte in the field of
Natural History. Maybe, it could be possible to portray him as an autodidact, but
never as a dilettante. By the time he finished that work, he had spent a long and
laborious séjour in Paris, from 1878 to 1881, and there he was involved in many
research projects developed at the National Museum of Natural History (Mercante
1936, 57; Casinos 2012, 403). Those researches, as Casinos (2012, 382) pointed out,
resulted in important publications like Les mammifères fossiles de l’Amérique du
Sud (Ameghino and Gervais 1914 [1880]) and La antigüedad del hombre en el Plata
(Ameghino 1918[1881]). Moreover, it was during this period that Filogenia began to
12 G. Caponi

be written before being finished at Buenos Aires in 1882 (cf. Cabrera 1944, 21;
Marquez-Miranda 1951, 82; Monserrat 1993, 53).
Filogenia is not the work of an alleged inspired visionary. Filogenia is not an
improbable flash of lucidity that sparks in the glooms of a poor and opaque
intellectual life. Filogenia arises from Ameghino’s effective contact, not only with
the whole tradition of that classical Paleontology that still survived in the Jardin des
Plantes of Paris but also with the works of some of the main architects of the first
evolutionary Paleontology (cf. Orione 1987, 459; Grimoult 1998, 151). Filogenia is
not, and it could never be, the work of an isolated man who, with childish and
provincial ingenuity, tries to reconstruct a whole science from a couple of personal
and supposedly brilliant intuitions. This is made very clear by Ameghino himself
(1915 [1884], p.13) when, already in the prologue, he notes the intellectual debt he
owes to the naturalists whose works have provided him with “the greatest amount of
data.” Although it is worth emphasizing that it was not so much a matter of data, but
rather of concepts and theoretical references.
Without neglecting to mention Hermann Burmeister, who had been established in
Argentina since 1861, Ameghino (1915 [1884], 13) points out that, while “for the
study of the structure of vertebrates,” he had “made use of the works of Cuvier,
Blainville, Owen, Gervais, Waterhouse, Agassiz, Gray and Flower,” concerning the
“genealogy of mammals” his main references were “the works of Flower, Gaudry,
Leidy, Cope, and Kowalesky.” Moreover, in some cases, Ameghino’s connection
with these naturalists was personal. Such was the case of Paul Gervais, Jean Louis
Armand de Quatrefages, Edward Cope, William Flower, Giuseppe Sergi, and
Gabriel de Mortillet (cf. Simpson 1984, 78; Casinos 2012, 67), but none of these
relationships could have been more relevant than the one Ameghino established with
Albert Gaudry (Piveteau 1961, 523; Podgorny 2005, 253). At least, as far as the
writing of Filogenia is concerned. This work, as it was already said, is a program, a
guide, and a methodology for the development of an Evolutionary Paleontology, a
Paleontology that engaged in the agenda that Darwin proposed as the main vector of
all Natural History, and Gaudry was one of the pioneers in this new way of studying
fossils (Buffetaut 1998, 81).
Gaudry, who since 1872 occupied the chair of Paleontology at the National
Museum of Natural History, was indeed a true pioneer in the evolutionary study of
fossils (Conry 1974, 221–222). He was undoubtedly one of the first to use paleon-
tological methods as the basis for establishing filiations between taxa (cf. Gaudry
1868, 15–16). Like many other paleontologists of the same period, he disagreed with
Darwin regarding the causal mechanisms involved in evolution (cf. Buffetaut 1998,
81). He even embraced an opaque theistic evolutionism (Piveteau 1961, 517;
Buffetaut 1998, 82). However, in the actual exercise of his paleontological work,
he always was engaged in the Darwinian program of reconstructing the tree of life
(cf. Gaudry 1878). It is there, in that work obsessively devoted to establishing the
relationships of filiation between the lineages he studied (Piveteau 1961, 517;
Buffetaut 1998, 82), that Gaudry’s Darwinism must be sought. Fortunately, his
sterile theistic speculations never influenced, nor could they influence, his
How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia? 13

contributions to Evolutionary Paleontology, and these were the exemplars that

guided Ameghino’s first evolutionary research and reflections.
A work such as Les mammifères fossils de l’Amérique du Sud (Ameghino and
Gervais 1914 [1880]) could have been written by a Cuvierian paleontologist.
However, after Filogenia, the Darwinian Ameghino emerged, and Gaudry had
something to do in that conversion that had nothing to do with personal convictions
but with ways of doing Paleontology. Therefore, in 1878, even though evolutionists
was still a minority both at Paris National Museum of Natural History and at
Sorbonne (cf. Simpson 1984, 100), in that very moment being able to have direct
contact with Gaudry was one of the best ways to become familiar with the emergent
Evolutionary Paleontology. Regarding that, and contrary to what Orione suggested
(1987, 459), Ameghino had not fallen into a bad place; he had fallen in the right
place at the best moment. At least for him, the chapter of Evolutionary Paleontology
to which Ameghino could contribute more, and better, was the Paleontology of
Mammals (cf. Marquez-Miranda 1951, 127; Reig 1961, 79).
The most accessible and remarkable fossils of the Argentine Pampa were the
remains of this group of vertebrates (Reig 1961, 79), and to study them nothing
could be more useful than a close familiarity with Cuvier’s paleontological works,
which were predominantly devoted to this taxon (cf. Cuvier 1992[1812]). It was not
by chance that Mammals was the group to whom Gaudry (1878) dedicated the first
volume of Les enchainements du monde animal, published in the same year that
Ameghino arrived at Paris. In other words, the National Museum of Natural History
in Paris was a great center for the development of Mammal Paleontology, and
nothing could be better for someone whose scientific work would be devoted to
the remains of Macrauchenias, Milodonts, and Glyptodonts. Within the walls of the
Gallery of Comparative Anatomy and Paleontology, at rue Buffon, were accumu-
lated the results of almost a century of research on this subject, and Gaudry proposed
a phylogenetic reading of this already accumulated and decanted knowledge, and it
was that reading that Ameghino understood and also developed.
The fact, anyway, is that Ameghino’s relationships are less important than the
conceptual references articulated and displayed in Filogenia. These conceptual
coordinates are so significant because they allow understanding the transition from
classical Paleontology to Evolutionary Paleontology that was still being experi-
enced; very especially in French Natural History, but also in all the scientific
community devoted to this domain of research. Regardless Ameghino could be
more or less close to this or that paleontologist, more or less famous, eminent, or
recognized; what should be pointed is that Filogenia constitutes, in each of its
paragraphs, an unbeatable document to understand, not only that transition that
Natural History was going through, but also to understand how the new ways of
doing Paleontology co-opted and subordinated those other ways of practicing that
science that was being surpassed by the development of Evolutionary Paleontology.
That is, Filogenia provides keys that allow understanding the modifications in the
ways of making Natural History brought about by the Darwinian Revolution.
This turning point implied a drastic reformulation, an enlargement, and a
rearticulating of the questionnaire that had guided the work of naturalists since the
14 G. Caponi

end of the eighteenth century, and Ameghino showed two important aspects of that
great transformation. The first aspect was the re-signification of the results and rules
of inference inherited from classical Natural History. That Natural History whose
great first guidelines, and fundamental exemplars, were established by George
Cuvier (cf. Caponi 2017, 63–4) and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (cf. Caponi
2017, 77). The second aspect, meanwhile, was the extension of these rules and the
establishing of new exemplars, new paradigmatic solutions of research problems,
which had to be applied in previously unthinkable puzzles. Regarding that, and
confirming what was said above, this book of Ameghino has an unusual clarity,
which is not easy to find in the works of other evolutionists of the same period. In
this sense, it is worth remembering Osvaldo Reig when, in the context of the
celebration of the first centenary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, he
referred to Ameghino and said:

In this year of Darwinian celebration, it is worth remembering his book Filogenia and his
other evolutionist essays. Ameghino not only introduced and fought for evolutionism in
Argentina; he was also a pioneer at world scale in the elaboration of the principles of
evolutionary Paleontology and Morphology. Filogenia is a book of philosophical Paleon-
tology and Morphology, as it was used to say at the time. Its value and meaning are not less
than that of more or less contemporary works of outstanding European and North American
evolutionary scholars; and it is much earlier than great works of similar purpose and subject,
such as Gaudry’s Paléontologie Philosophique, published in 1886. (Reig 1959, 35)

It is impossible, however, to grasp the “value and meaning” of Filogenia without

considering or without paying attention to something that Ameghino (1915 [1884]
69) has understood very clearly: the cognitive target that guided the progress of what
Bowler (1996, 1) described as the “first Evolutionary Biology,” which was the
development of the phylogenetic program (Caponi 2011, 4). Only by inserting
Filogenia in this titanic cooperative research agenda, without insisting on the
anachronism of giving to the question of the mechanisms a place that it did not
have in the Evolutionary Biology of the nineteenth century (Novoa and Levine 2010,
98), it will be possible to understand Filogenia and the epistemological vector that
guided Ameghino’s researches. No less than the history of the science made in
France, in the United States, or Japan, the history of the science made between the
Rio Bravo and the Cabo de Hornos also deserves the epistemological precautions
that are required for its correct understanding and even for its proper valuation.

Ameghino’s Darwinism

The idea that Florentino Ameghino was not very rigorous, and somewhat confused,
regarding his theoretical commitments often has to do with the alleged Lamarckian
remnants that would overshadow his Darwinism. Angel Cabrera (1944, 31)
(Concerning the career of the Madrilenian Angel Cabrera [1879 1960], and his
role in the growth of Argentine Paleontology, see the obituary written by Jorge
Crespo (1960)) stated that Ameghino:
How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia? 15

He paid homage to Darwin, in whom he seemed to see something like the main apostle of
evolutionism, but, by a singular paradox, he was a true Lamarckian and Lamarckian of a
high mechanistic hue. In his Filogenia there is nothing of natural selection nor of the struggle
for life; everything is based on adaptation and inheritance of somatic modifications. After
going through its pages, the reader cannot help but wonder if the author knew the founda-
tions of Darwin and Wallace's evolutionism.

This assessment by Cabrera, despite expressing a clear misunderstanding of

Ameghino’s work and its context, has been widely accepted and repeatedly ratified
(Just for instance, see: Marquez-Miranda (1951, 136); Reig (1961, 77); Orione
(1987, 457); Casinos (2012, 98)); without perceiving that it derives from a very
distorted vision of what it meant “to be Darwinist” at the time when Ameghino
outlined his research program. Nevertheless, if that distortion is avoided, it is
possible to recognize Filogenia as a lucid and ambitious proposal destined to
make viable a complete accomplishment of those epistemic objectives that Darwin
proposed in On the Origin of Species (1859), for Natural History.
Unfortunately, this distortion did not lack sponsorship. It has been reinforced by a
reading of the Evolutionary Biology of the nineteenth century, and of the first
decades of the twentieth century, that was largely favored by the advent of the
New Synthesis. The revision of the history of Evolutionary Biology promoted by
authors such as Julian Huxley (1942) and Ernst Mayr (1980) gave excessive
prominence to the controversies regarding the hereditary factors and the causal
mechanisms that produced evolutionary changes; and that attitude led us to think
that, from Darwin onwards, Evolutionary Biology had been anxiously obsessed, and
almost immobilized, by the problems that the New Synthesis had finally solved. As
Bowler (1996, 2) remarked in Life’s splendid drama: “the selection-centered view-
point of many earlier studies was whiggish in that it assumed a straight line of
development leading from Darwin to the modern genetical theory of natural
selection.”
The point, however, is that Peter Bowler himself had echoed this view in his
influential works The Eclipse of Darwinism (Bowler 1983) and The Non-Darwinian
Revolution (Bowler 1988). Both are widely read by those historians that work on the
Latin American manifestations of evolutionism and both are too focused on disputes
that existed, but that was not so crucial for the main part of the researches undertaken
in the Evolutionary Biology developed from the decade of 1860, until the rise of the
New Synthesis. Thus, regarding his interest in the non-selectionist causal explana-
tions of evolution that were conceived by many biologists, Peter Bowler (1996, 2)
admitted that he was “influenced by the traditional interpretation,” which “was still
focusing on the mechanism of evolution.” Thus, rectifying that position, and trying a
subtle self-criticism, in Life’s splendid drama, he recognized that, for many years:

Our standard histories of the impact of Darwinism have been skewed by a concentration on
the debate over mechanisms at the expense of the debates that arose over how to interpret the
course of life’s evolution. The first generation of evolutionary biologists was primarily
concerned to reconstruct the history of life. on earth (Bowler 1996, 2–3)
16 G. Caponi

In other words, what that standard vision of the history of Evolutionary Biology
had left in the background was no more and no less than the main research agenda of
that Evolutionary Biology developed from Darwin until the first decades of the
twentieth century. That first Evolutionary Biology – as Bowler so properly labeled it
– was a space of controversy, but also of cooperation, which was articulated around
the reconstruction of the history of life on earth. Nevertheless, this history of life, it is
necessary to emphasize it, was seen in a very specific way. It was understood as the
trace of a great genealogy: as the reconstruction of a single great phylogeny that had
to be recomposed as a gigantic mosaic in which all the particular phylogenies of the
different groups of living beings would be progressively and coherently inserted.
Within the framework of this program, originally conceived and proposed by
Darwin (1859, 486–7), the fundamental questions were genealogical: Do vertebrates
descend from ascidians or annelids? (cf. Russell 1916, 271–274; Bowler 1996,
141–147); Do the four lineages of arthropods descend from an exclusive common
ancestor? (cf. Bowler 1996, 115). Or recalling a case of those studied by Ameghino
(1915 [1884], 373–374): armadillos descended from glyptodonts, or was it the
opposite? (Caponi 2017, 136).
As Bowler (1996, 14) himself showed in Life’s splendid drama, for most of the
evolutionists of the twentieth century, the genuine Darwinian commitment was to
develop that phylogenetic program. For doing that, the morphological analyses,
proper to two already recognized and consecrated disciplines such as Comparative
Anatomy and Embryology, could be reinterpreted in such a way that they allowed a
reformulation of the objectives of those disciplines and of the objectives to which
Taxonomy, Paleontology, and Biogeography responded (Russell 1916, 247; Bowler
1996, 14). A reformulation that was also a unification and coordination. By associ-
ating unit of type with common descend, Darwin showed how all these disciplines,
already consolidated, could be reoriented, together, towards the tracing of phylog-
enies (Caponi 2011, 101); and this facilitated the adhesion that quickly conquered
the phylogenetic program (Caponi 2011, 102). With Darwinism, that constellation of
disciplines which was Natural History, not only became unified in its bases but also
in its objectives; which also became more ambitious than they were before. That was
the Darwinism of Thomas Huxley, of Ernst Haeckel, of Carl Gegenbaur, of Edwin
Lankester; and Anton Dörhn (cf. Russell 1916; Bowler 1996); and it is in that
context that the standard view of the history of Evolutionary Biology failed to
capture properly, that Filogenia should be placed. Going the same for Ameghino’s
Darwinism.
The history of the scientific knowledge produced in Latin America cannot be
made without problematizing the history of science in general. Although sometimes
it could be not very conspicuous in its accomplishments, the science made in Latin
American Science still deserves that courtesy. Otherwise, such a study may incur in
an uncritical importation of historiographical errors that will provoke confusion and
misdirection, and the topic raised by Ameghino’s supposedly lax Darwinism is a
good example of that. Considered in virtue of that standard vision of the History of
Evolutionary Biology that Bowler proposed to revise, Ameghino appears as a
scientist who is not very rigorous in his theoretical commitments and that fits very
How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia? 17

well with what can be expected from a naturalist whose works were typical instances
of integrated subordination. Nevertheless, by considering Ameghino in this way, the
reading of Filogenia is misused: instead of considering it as a document that would
facilitate that historiographical review proposed by Bowler, it is considered as the
expression of a theoretical misconception that reinforces the standard narrative.
To doubt, as Cabrera did, that Ameghino knew the foundations of Darwinism is
not a sign of meticulousness; it is only a symptom of misunderstanding. It can only
indicate that Cabrera, and his repeaters, had not understood, neither which were the
theoretical assumptions and objectives that guided the Evolutionary Biology in
which Ameghino’s worked, nor the theoretical assumptions and objectives to
which the writing of Filogenia obeyed. For dissipating Cabrera’s suspicion, it is
enough to remember, again, that, in On the Origin of Species, what is proposed as a
conquest, and it is capitalized on as an achievement, is the theoretical unification, by
the explanation of the unity of type by common descent, of the evidence of Bioge-
ography, Paleontology, Comparative Anatomy and Embryology (Darwin 1859,
413). Darwin saw there his highest card; and, of his fundamental theses, that was
the one that more immediately and deeply affected the ways of doing Natural History
(Bowler 1996, 7). Beyond the disagreements about the mechanisms of evolutionary
change that arose in the following years, that whole field of researches committed,
jointly and promptly, with the thesis of the common descent and assumed the
ambitious agenda of reconstructing the tree of life.
In that context, it must also situate the alleged “Lamarckism” of Ameghino.
Regarding the topic of evolutionary mechanisms, he was as eclectic and pluralistic
as most of his contemporaries (Salgado 2011, 122); among which the so-called
Neo-Lamarckism was very common (Buffetaut 1998, 83). This is especially true for
Filogenia, which, concluded in 1882, was published just in 1884: the year after
Weissman’s first publication questioning the hereditary transmission of acquired
characters. That is, Filogenia was published long before the Weissman’s theses
could have any significant impact on the way by which paleontologists visualized
their positions. It is not surprising, therefore, that Ameghino was somewhat vague on
these issues (cf. Salgado 2011, 134) and careless about the polarization that occurred
in those years that, long after, Julian Huxley (1942, 22) portrayed as “the eclipse of
Darwinism.”
That attitude, moreover, is perfectly understandable. In the first place, and above
all, because, as has been said so many times, Darwin (1859, 134) himself had not
discarded those mechanisms that were later labeled as Lamarckian or
Neo-Lamarckian. Further, it is necessary to keep in mind that all these questions
about the mechanisms involved in the evolutionary processes were not relevant and
pertinent for making phylogenetic reconstructions (Novoa and Levine 2010, 98). As
far as these reconstructions are concerned, what was very relevant were the instru-
ments that could be used to establish ancestor-descendant relationships between
lineages and to reconstruct the sequences of changes in character states. And that
was the issue of those laws enunciated in Filogenia (cf. Caponi 2017, 125).
Before the advent of Darwinism, paleontologists determined and reconstructed
fossils based on those functional correlations highlighted by Cuvier but also
18 G. Caponi

presupposing the morphological constants on which Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had

insisted (cf. Guillo 2003, 160). And this would continue to be like that in the
framework of Evolutionary Paleontology (cf. Huxley 1893, 86). The novelty was
the possibility of using these reconstructions, as well as the functional and morpho-
logical knowledge involved in them, for reconstructing phylogenies; and this was the
main matter of Ameghino’s Filogenia. Ameghino (1915 [1884], 7–8) aimed to
enunciate laws that would allow reconstructing relations of filiation with certainty
and precision (cf. Ameghino 1915 [1884], 68).
The enunciation of those laws of phylogenetic seriation constituted, according to
Ameghino (1915 [1884], 502–503), the core and the main contribution of Filogenia
(Orione 1987, 455). These laws were important not because they revealed causal
invariants involved in the evolutionary processes, they were not causal laws (Caponi
2017, 105), but because they individualized sequential invariants that defined
irreversible successions in the states of certain characters (Ameghino 1915[1884],
7). These invariants made it possible to serialize, phylogenetically, such states
(Ameghino 1915[1884], 67): something crucial in the mapping and validation of
ancestry relationships between taxa (Ameghino 1915[1884], 8).
Cuvier (1992[1812]) had shown that by following certain laws concerning the
functional correlations of organic parts, it was possible to achieve relatively reliable
reconstructions of whole organisms having as reference only fragmentary bone
debris of those living beings (Caponi 2017, 62). The fragments of an herbivore’s
teeth led to infer a certain conformation of the digestive system; the presence of
remains of horns and hooves confirmed that inference. Further, that same dentition
could also indicate that the animal in question must be a placental mammal. Another
form of dentition could have indicated that the animal to be reconstructed was a
carnivorous marsupial; that would also allow us to know something about the shape
of its pelvis.
However, all those ways of reasoning, and the correlations that guide them, refer
only to the form and parts of individual organisms. Often, they can allow us to
reconstruct the profiles of a previously unknown species of which only fragmentary
traces remain; but they tell nothing about the genealogical relationships of that
species (Ameghino 1915[1884], 69). To discover those relationships, with rigor
and precision, Ameghino thought (1915[1884], 10–11), that were necessary laws
of another kind: laws of the evolutionary succession of states of character
(cf. Ameghino 1915[1884], 234) and not laws of coexistence of parts as the
Cuvierian correlations or as the morphological constants pointed out by Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire. These laws, of a newer type, should point out sequences of evolution-
ary change that, without manifesting themselves in all lineages, would be such that,
once initiated, they would never be reversed, even if they could be stopped
(Ameghino 1915[1884], 231). Thus, in case of knowing these laws, it will be
possible to order, in a true evolutive sequence, the different states of any character
for which those laws were pertinent.
Of course, this is not the place to analyze those laws. What is important here is
just to remark that the effort to enunciate those laws responds to a very precise
theoretical framework; which those same laws also allow understanding. The correct
How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia? 19

reading of Filogenia requires a good comprehension of the Evolutionary Biology in

which that work is inserted and takes on its theoretical significance and that, besides
allowing to understand and to place Ameghino in that framework, also allows a
better understanding of the theoretical universe in which all his works, conceptual
and empirical, were produced. What is valid for Lankester, or Haeckel, is no less
valid for Ameghino.

Conclusion

The reading of Filogenia shows that Ameghino’s Darwinian commitment was not
just firm but also lucid and coherent: based on a rigorous theoretical reflection and
fully engaged with the main theoretical objectives of the Evolutionary Biology that
was developing during the years when he worked as a paleontologist. For that, the
arguments developed in Filogenia helps to understand how that first Evolutionary
Biology was: its reading is quite relevant for the epistemological history of Evolu-
tionary Biology in general, and Paleontology in particular. Filogenia shows how the
Darwinian perspective allows the use of the methods already established by
pre-evolutionary Anatomy and Paleontology in the development of that new
research agenda that is the reconstruction of the tree of life, and this is done with
remarkable clarity. Maybe, that can be explained, at less in part, by the relatively
marginal position that Ameghino occupied in that transnational network in which
Evolutionary Paleontology developed.
The very situation of having to appropriate knowledge whose guidelines were
defined, within the framework of overseas institutions and foreign traditions may
demand a significant intellectual effort. In doing that, little can be considered
obvious and established. Moreover, this effort of understanding is often associated
with the need to train other researchers for participating in the production of
knowledge. That is why this effort of appropriation may come to produce works
capable of allowing these new researchers to understand the problems, concepts, and
fundamental objectives of the science to whose construction they must be actively
integrated. Those works may take the form of simple manuals, or they can be a little
more ambitious, as it was the case of Filogenia. However, in both cases, they may be
of great interest to the historian of science. They will serve to understand how an area
of research is developing within the scientific community under consideration; but,
beyond that, the reading of these works can help to understand more general and
fundamental questions. Topics that, going beyond the study of what goes on in a
narrow scientific community, involve the more general aspects of the History of
Science.

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CITE THIS PAPER AS:

Caponi G. (2022): How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia?. In: Barahona A. (ed.):

Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and
Medicine. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48616-7_5-1

See:
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3-030-48616-7_5-1

Received: 20 October 2020 // Accepted: 22 October 2020

First Online: 09 January 2022

DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48616-7_5-1

Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

Online ISBN: 978-3-030-48616-7