How Lincoln and Darwin Shaped the Modern World

Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). Adam Gopnik, author of Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (2009), had this to say about both men, and why their ideas matter:

With the usual compression of popular history, their reputations have been reduced to single words, mottoes to put beneath a profile on a commemorative coin or medal: “Evolution!” for one and “Emancipation!” for the other. Though, with the usual irony of history, the mottoes betray the men. Lincoln came late... and reluctantly to emancipation, while perhaps the least original thing in Darwin’s amazingly original work was the idea of evolution... We’re not wrong to work these beautiful words onto their coins, though: they were the engineers of the alterations. They found a way to make those words live. Darwin and Lincoln did not make the modern world. But, by becoming "icons" of free human government and slow natural change, they helped to make our moral modernity

The deepest common stuff the two men share, though, is in what they said and wrote—their mastery of a new kind of liberal language. They matter most because they wrote so well. Lincoln got to be president essentially because he made a couple of terrific speeches, and we remember him most of all because he gave a few more as president. Darwin was a writer who published his big ideas in popular books. A commercial publishing house published The Origin of Species in the same year that it published novels and memoirs, and Darwin’s work remains probably the only book that changed science that an amateur can still sit down now and read right through. It’s so well written that we don’t think of it as well written, just as Lincoln’s speeches are so well made that they seem to us as obvious and natural as smooth stones on the beach.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine, February 2009

Darwin’s native land celebrates his bicentenary through Darwin200. Wikipedia provides external links to his seminal book, On the Origin of Species (1859), in the public domain (PublicLiterature.Org has the full text with embedded audio).

For links to Lincoln-related information, see HyperLincs: Celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday online (great tip to check out iTunes U for its access to free lectures from universities).