Today is the bicentennial birthdate of those two colossals, as they were born on the same day, Feb. 12, 1809. The author of that article above, which I read last summer, argues that Lincoln matters more essentially because evolution by natural selection would have been discovered sooner or later; Lincoln was needed precisely when Lincoln executed. Indeed Alfred Russel Wallace proposed an independent theory of NS before Origin was even published.

Today, 200 years later, it is no controversy that Lincoln was a great leader and president. But evolution by natural selection has to prove itself seemingly every single day, an affront to its explanatory genius and an embarrassment to human beings everywhere. Charles Darwin distilled twenty years of observation and brilliant insight into a single, powerful book. Who's to say another conquistador wouldn't have prematurely botched the final product, as history reveals conquistadors are apt to do, leaving even more ignorance in the world than we find today? Lincoln held a country together; Darwin elevated the consciousness of a species and elucidated the very essence of change itself.