Introduction: Attitudes towards New Ideas

The reception of Darwinism in the second half of the nineteenth century in Latin America could be framed according to Thomas Glick's models. Glick suggests that the two main attitudes of scientific communities or other social groups towards new ideas could be: (1) a combination of anxiety and opposition, or (2) a combination of acceptance and adaptation. Furthermore, it is clear that the reception of new ideas can result in struggles between different ideologies.

In science, for example, anxiety emerges from the need to reinterpret reality according to the latest discoveries about nature. In religion, anxiety emerges from the fear of losing previously approved ways of understanding reality, according to the direct action of God in nature. So, for Glick, when a new idea is perceived as a loss, the attitude generated is resistance but if it is perceived as a gain, the attitude is appropriation.

Which type of attitude arises in any given social group depends on how the new idea is stated and presented. According to Glick, the adaptation could be antithetic (when a position is confronted with another), thetic (when a given knowledge is interpreted according to a more general knowledge), corrective (when a statement is refined by comparison with another) or extensional (when the restatement of a given position results in a new, more comprehensive view, as with social Darwinism).