1.
Darwin on Lincoln and Vice Versa
Two of the world’s greatest modern thinkers are much celebrated, but what did they know of one another?
* By Laura Helmuth, Mark Strauss and Terence
Because Darwin and Lincoln are forever paired, thanks to their shared birthdate 200 years ago and the profound and lasting (but separate) influence of their ideas and actions, as Adam Gopnik explains, a question arises: What did they think of each other?
In today's hyper-mediated, celebrity-saturated global village the world's leading biologist and the leader of the free world might be expected to meet at, say, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (though we're not aware that Lincoln or Darwin skied), at a climate-policy summit or over pints at Bono's.
But Darwin and Lincoln did not cross paths.
article here
2. How Lincoln and Darwin Shaped the Modern World
Their shared birth date is an intriguing coincidence, but what truly unites Darwin and Lincoln is how they shaped the modern world
* By Adam Gopnik click here.
snip-
"By the time Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were dead—the American murdered by a pro-slavery terrorist in 1865, the Englishman after a long illness in 1882—the shape of history had changed, and the lives they had led and the things they had said had done a lot to change it. Two small splashes had helped to change the tide of time. Very different beliefs, ones that we now treat as natural and recognize as just part of the background hum of our time, were in place. People were beginning to understand that the world was very, very old, and that the animals and plants in it had changed dramatically over the eons—and though just how they had changed was still debated, the best guesses, then as now, involved slow alteration through a competition for resources over a very long time. People were convinced, on the whole, that democratic government, arrived at by reform or revolution, was a plausible and strong way to organize a modern nation. (A giant statue, one of the largest since antiquity, of a goddess of Liberty was under construction in once-again Republican France to be sent to a vindicated Republican America, to commemorate this belief.) Slavery in the Western world was finished. (Although racism wasn't.)"
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