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This book provides both for academic historians and the general reader a broad perspective on Darwin's impact in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds. In Latin American countries with black and Amerindian populations, evolutionary theory was quickly mobilized for theorizing racial differences, while in Spain attention was focused on class differentiation, explained by a series of Darwinian, Social Darwinist, and Eugenic hypotheses. The wide variety of approaches to evolutionary and social theory in countries whose culture was very similar points illuminates those issues thought to be of particular significance for national identity, whether political, ethnic, or racial.