Newsweek asks, “Who was more important: Lincoln or Darwin?”  They ask because these two gentlemen share the same birthday (February 12, 1809).  Who’s more lauded and loved?  Easy.  Lincoln.  Who’s work has had more impact on human history?  Also easy.  Darwin, hands down.  Not to front Lincoln, because he was a man of iron will, but what he did, with the Emancipation Proclamation, in many ways, was inevitable.  Congress, in fact, tried to beat him to the punch, and the South discussed something similar to steal the thunder of such an act.  But then, with the march of scientific endeavors in the 19th century, what Darwin did was also inevitable, but no less enormous.

As delighted as he was with his discovery, Darwin was equally horrified, because he understood the consequences of his theory. Mankind was no longer the culmination of life but merely part of it; creation was mechanistic and purposeless. In a letter to a fellow scientist, Darwin wrote that confiding his theory was “like confessing a murder.” Small wonder that instead of rushing to publish his theory, he sat on it-for 20 years. He started a series of notebooks in which he began refining his theory, recording the results of his research in fields as disparate as animal husbandry and barnacles. Over the next five or six years, he went through notebook after notebook, including one in which he began to pose metaphysical questions arising from his research. Do animals have consciences? Where does the idea of God come from?

This essay is a great read, so long as you understand the modern biases that have sainted both men, glossing over much of what they said and did for the sake of the children.