Today...

...is February 12, 2003.

Exactly 194 years ago today may have been the single most momentous date of birth ever.  On this date in 1809, both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born.

Born into a frontier farming family in Hardin County, Kentucky, Lincoln had little or no formal schooling.  In his childhood, his family moved to Indiana and Illinois; it was a difficult existence, filled with hard manual labor and family crises.  Yet this self-taught, ungainly giant rapidly rose to pre-eminence as an attorney in the state capital of Illinois, briefly held a seat in the US House of Representatives, then ran for President as the American political system was falling apart at the seams.  In a four-way race in 1860, he became President as southern states were seceding from the Union over the issues of state versus federal power and our national legacy of human slavery. 

For all their brilliance and logic in constructing the Constitution, the Founding Fathers had glossed over these essential inconsistencies in American governance and society.  Lincoln guided the national response to secession, bearing up through early military disasters while also presiding over the re-formation of the nation.  Under his leadership, the nation finally began the process of working through and overcoming its contradictory flaws, a process that continues to this very day.  His eloquence—the power, depth, and clarity of his words—thrills and challenges us to this day.  That his life was violently cut short, mere days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, simultaneously cements his status as our great national martyr and opens endless speculation about how our post-Civil War reconstruction into one nation might have turned out had Lincoln’s presidency continued.

The consummate observational scientist, Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England.  A product of upper-class gentility, he studied for the ministry at Christ’s College, Cambridge after an abortive earlier study of medicine in Edinburgh.  Signing on as naturalist aboard HMS Beagle, he collected, examined, and studied during the ship’s lengthy explorations.  Returning to England in 1836, he spent the next two decades organizing his notes, developing his logical arguments, and writing his masterpiece, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). 

Though he could not possibly have known the cellular and genetic mechanisms upon which his observations and inferences rest, and was therefore incorrect in most of the small details, the general principles of his theories—natural selection, random mutation, competition for resources and reproductive advantage—remain powerful and important in contemporary science and in contemporary intellectual investigation of all kinds.  The magnitude of his intellect, apparent on every page of The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and other works by Darwin, was coupled with a voluminous knowledge of biological and physical phenomena of the world that he used to demonstrate and exemplify the conclusions to which the evidence led.

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