Lessici della “caduta”: degenerazione, declino ed estinzione nel discorso evoluzionistico tra XVIII e XIX secolo

The paper reconstructs, from a historical-epistemological perspective, the diverse conceptual pathways through which the theme of “decline” in natural history took shape between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ranging from Buffon’s theories of degeneration to Lamarckian views of adaptation, and eventually to the linkage between degeneration and extinction, I discuss a heterogeneous vocabulary forged through the co-construction of cultural and scientific values, which, by the late nineteenth century, became intertwined with the fin-de-siècle’s broader cultural anxieties.