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It would be a stretch to assign significance to the coincidence itself, but the dual bicentennial gives us a chance to reflect on the men’s lives and lasting influences.\u00a0 The latest issue of Smithsonian <\/em>magazine (February, 2009) makes a respectable attempt.\u00a0 Three articles — on Lincoln, Darwin, and both — examine the men within their era and looking back from ours.\u00a0 The articles are worth reading.<\/p>\nI especially liked two adjacent paragraphs within the third article<\/a> (by Adam Gopnik) that reduced their mythological statures to those of real men.\u00a0 They were neither saints nor heroes nor gods, the magazine says. Lincoln was a shrewd “backwoods lawyer, … more of a politician than we would like him to be.”\u00a0 Darwin, meanwhile, was a “frumpy and tedious” naturalist who would “run on and on narrowly on [his] pet subjects.”<\/p>\n Having read much about both men — but falling far short of being a scholar on either — I rather like the view of Lincoln and Darwin as ordinary men, somewhat awkward in their own skins, who rose to greatness through the power of their arguments.\u00a0 Lincoln was <\/em>a shrewd politician.\u00a0 He negotiated and made compromises.\u00a0 His place in history as the Great Emancipator was not along his original course, but he eventually arrived there.\u00a0 Darwin did not set out to create a new science.\u00a0 He was content to spend most of his days working in his garden at Down House.\u00a0 But his decades-long observations made his eventual theory of evolution difficult to ignore.\u00a0 Both Lincoln and Darwin were steered by ideas, faced overwhelming opposition, and maintained their beliefs.\u00a0 We know them today for what they said and wrote.\u00a0 In the end, their ideas spoke for themselves.<\/p>\n They were interesting men.\u00a0 Their names remain well-known by people around the world.\u00a0 They are each remembered more in mythological form than in human terms.\u00a0 They are disliked by some today and admired by many more.\u00a0 It’s been two hundred years.\u00a0 History doesn’t have many figures that inspire such passion so long after their lifetimes, but Lincoln and Darwin are two.\u00a0 They were born on the same day.\u00a0 Remarkable men, remarkable coincidence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A remarkable coincidence will be observed next week.\u00a0 Two men who made enormous impacts on the world were born on the same day two hundred years ago: February 12, 1809.\u00a0 Abraham Lincoln, arguably the greatest American president, was born in … Continue reading