Darwinkeria Darwinkeria

2010/09/01 Altonaga, Kepa - EHUko biologia irakaslea Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Eboluzioa
• Historia

A long time ago, still young and green, and when I had just graduated in Biology, I started working the technique in Basque. I want to say that after studying all the studies in Spanish, I built or made my own language to explain the biological issues in Basque, and is that I looked for materials so scarce in many places.

No one will be surprised of the elderly knowing, for example, that I learned from memory the dictionary of Natural Sciences. In my desire to complete my biology technique, I also put myself in the dictionary of Plazido Muxika, and a word I found left me groggy, or even more, kao in its entirety. Sure you have successful, of course, the Basque prize for the evolutionary entry. There is no need for deep discoveries about the Basque language to know that -keria is a marked suffix, that is, it means something that is rejected, such as disappointment or liberalization. That darbingo, the darwinkeria, of course, rejects all of Darwin, stigmatizing from the same name.

Plazido Muxika's dictionary was published in 1965 and came to fill the huge vocabulary gap between Spanish and Basque. In spite of a great advance in this sense, this offensive term has become for my eyes the emblem of the fateful entry of evolutionism in Euskal Herria. And it is that this whirlpool tells us perfectly what could be the opinion of Plazido Muxika on Darwinism, but not only that of the speaker himself, but also that of many and many of the notables of the Basque world. The question is that this opposite attitude is ancient and does not have to do directly with Darwinism. The Darwinism was found from the beginning with what we could call "the wall of Arbelbide": that wall was the Basque language; the Basque language, for Janpierre Arbelbide, and many others, was a protective, insulating wall that looked at Euskal Herria of all the dangers and Algerians of the world. Due to the wall of Arbelbide or, among other things, in Basque there is no sliding book, only religious books: we know what literature we have had until yesterday. It can be said that the Basques wanted to create a theme park, a Lotilandia. Well, Darwin's ideas were crushed for a long time against this wall.

In this sense, it would be quite foreseeable to know that Darwinism had much more success among Basques outside of Euskal Herria than among Basques living in an asphyxiating and obscure environment of Euskal Herria. Thus it seems that the explanation is too schematic, but we can understand it like this, for example, a Armand David, or a José Aretxabaleta. The uriostare José Aretxabaleta learned from the tertullians of a medicine from Montevideo who was Darwin and, later, when he joined the university, he exposed among his students the ideas of Darwin and Haeckel during a long period of 1874-1906, being the principal precursor and diffuser of Darwinism in South America, far from the coactions of his country.

In any case, I think it is much more surprising the case of the Ezpian priest Armand David, who pierced the wall of Arbelbide and, in addition, the silent conspiracy that suffered Darwinism in France, to the field of the contradictions that was supposed to be a cure. Armand David was sent to China in 1861, but there he worked mostly as a naturalist under the responsibility of the Paris Museum of Natural Sciences and, apparently, as a spy. As you know, he discovered the big panda and many other species in the first two exploration campaigns. Very ill of health, he returned to Europe in 1870 for a break and read in the Italian Gen the seminar book “The origin of species”, probably in Italian version, not in the French called by himself.

However, Armand David was quite convinced of the goodness of Darwin's hypothesis, since when he returned to China in 1872 for a third exploration campaign, Darwinism was well guarded in the colco and his faisanes offered him the necessary evidence to convert it completely into darwindar. In spite of everything, it would highlight two key factors for the conversion of Armand David: one, the reading of the Italian translation, and the other, the fact that in the campaigns for China it has acted as British explorers--in the manner of a Alfred Wallace, for example, of everything and in large quantities.

In Euskal Herria, the case of doctor and writer Jean Etxepare is paradigmatic. Born in Argentina, Etxepare studied in Bordeaux and presented his doctoral thesis in 1901. There he read the books of Haeckel and Nietzsche. In 1905 he was a doctor of Alduz and at that time he began to collaborate with the weekly Eskualduna. The doctor of Alduce is absolutely extraordinary in the small Parnaso of the Basque letters, since he is one of the few laity in the colorful succession of clerics of our literary history. He published two books, Buruxkak (1910) and Beribilez (1931), which most poisonous believed Villasante. The head was scandalous, among other things, for his sex and love: an authentic subversive in the then Lotiland, and although it was published in 1910, it has in fact been kidnapped before and after censored for 70 years. Therefore, it will not be surprising that for the second book it was known that Etxepare was more innocent. Beribilez tells us a day of travel, from Cambo to Loyola, to return again to Cambo. Logically, around this trip, Etxepare twisted a lot of questions and, in turn, he encrypted the evolution of the world and life in five or six compact lines: it can be said that he wanted to transmit us with smuggling. Well, Canon Piarres Lafitte amassed this poisonous episode three times and tried to neutralize it -- even later Etxepare's death -- knowing that Haeckel was tablespoon between Etxepare's lines.

In my opinion, the episode is inexplicable: on the one hand, the doctor of Alduce tries to bore the wall of Arbelbide and, on the other, the canon Piarres Lafitte enclosing immediately the cracks and cracks. That is, in general terms, the collective of "doctors" with the intention of introducing a certain Darwinist air, in front of the collective of "priests" that retains the stiff orthodoxy of Lotiland. On one side you can cite many names, such as the agronomist Bizente Aizpuru or the doctor and writer of Larreko Fermin Irigarai, and on the other -- the pharmacist and Jesuit José Antonio Laburu Olaskoaga or the patriarch of Basque culture Jose Migel Barandiaran -- but the beginning of the definition would be too long.

Fortunately, XX. The situation for the last quarter of the century has been modified. I, as a milestone, mention the poem Omnipotent Hydrogen by Xabier Amuriza, published in 1977, in which I discovered that the traditional biblical cosmogony, for the first time, has become an evolutionary whole. At first it was hydrogen, and the principle was hydrogen, and...