The first two decades of the twentieth century were not a golden age for the reception of Darwinism. Sir Julian Huxley (1887-1975) and Peter Bowler (1944-) developed the descriptor, “the eclipse of Darwinism,” to explain the state of affairs prior to the “modern evolutionary synthesis” of genetics and the theory of natural selection.The reception of Darwinism, during this period in China, has not been well explored by academic scholars. The “eclipse,” if it did happen, never stopped or delayed the pace of the development of biology in China. In this paper, I will investigate the development of science, particularly biology, by describing the establishment of the Science Society of China in June 1914, and its official publication, Kexue (lit. Science), which remained the major, if not the only, intellectual site for Chinese biologists to debate Darwinism. I will illuminate the dissemination of evolutionary ideas through the creative discussions in Kexue, in the 1910s, to test the hypothesis of an “eclipse” in a Chinese context and seek a possible answer to the question of why Chinese biologists had little interest in the translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species in the 1910s.
