Louis Agassiz en Chile y Argentina: Una historia poco conocida

Abstract

Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) was a famous and influential Swiss geologist and paleontologist, who studied medicine in Heidelberg and Munich. During this time, his study on fishes interested Georges Cuvier, who invited him to Paris to study his own fish collection. Herewith, he acquired a catastrophist and creationist perspective on the development of life, as opposed to the evolutionary theory of Darwin (Juárez Barrera et al., 2016). He then worked at the University of Genève, in Switzerland, from where he acquired world-wide reputation with his books on glaciers in 1840 and 1847, in which he interpreted the presence of erratic boulders in the pre-alpine lowlands as transported by glaciers that in the geological past were more extended than at present. He even visualized the Earth fully covered by ice, a snowball earth condition, which was reconsidered during the last part of the XX century. In 1846, he moved to Harvard as zoology and geology professor, and he became one of the main scientific personalities of the US, by his qualities as a researcher, and mainly, as a communicator of science. He participated in the creation of the Academy of Sciences and of the Compared Anatomy Museum at Harvard. He was the last great scientist who denied Darwin´s theory of evolution, and held firmly to the catastrophist / creationist perspective, which led him into considerations about human races that brought him discredit.