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Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to discuss how the epistemology of Darwinism and its interpretation by Ernst Haeckel, guided German natural scientists Hermann von Ihering and Fritz Müller to position themselves in the ongoing debate on human races and their mixtures in Brazil during the 19th Century.

Paper long abstract:

In addition to the splendor of the nature, during the 18th and 19th century foreign natural scientists were impressed by the Brazilian racial diversity. The so-called mixture of races aroused from the encounter of European migratory waves and the kidnapping of millions of African people enslaved with native indigenous peoples, and became the object of study of medicine, law, physical anthropology, and biology in the 19th century. The “miscegenation problem”, as it was called by scholars, was soon pointed out by the economic and political elites as a fundamental cause of Brazilian social backwardness. Naturalists working in different fields of study turned to understanding races and their mixtures in the country. Charles Darwin's (1809-82) theory of evolution of species, as well as the interpretations of Darwinism proposed by Ernst Haeckel (1934-1919) and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), served as a conceptual apparatus for foreign scientists residing in in the country, such as the Germans Hermann von Ihering (1850-1930) and Fritz Müller (1822-97) and the Swiss Emil Goeldi (1859-1917), as well as some of his Brazilian peers, such as Miranda Azevedo (1851-1907), to focus on the biology of human races based on empirical observation of the Brazilian case. This paper aims to discuss há the epistemology of the natural sciences, especially Darwinism and its interpretation by Haeckel, guided Ihering and Müller to position themselves in the debate on human races and their mixtures in Brazil.