Science Talk

Rodjk #613 · Guest

http://www.newsweek.com/id/143742

How's this for a coincidence? Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were
born in the same year, on the same day: Feb. 12, 1809. As historical
facts go, it amounts to little more than a footnote. Still, while it's
just a coincidence, it's a coincidence that's guaranteed to make you
do a double take the first time you run across it. Everybody knows
Darwin and Lincoln were near-mythic figures in the 19th century. But
who ever thinks of them in tandem? Who puts the theory of evolution
and the Civil War in the same sentence? Why would you, unless you're
writing your dissertation on epochal events in the 19th century? But
instinctively, we want to say that they belong together. It's not just
because they were both great men, and not because they happen to be
exact coevals. Rather, it's because the scientist and the politician
each touched off a revolution that changed the world.

As soon as you do start comparing this odd couple, you discover there
is more to this birthday coincidence than the same astrological chart
(as Aquarians, they should both be stubborn, visionary, tolerant, free-
spirited, rebellious, genial but remote and detached—hmmm, so far so
good). As we approach their shared bicentennial, there is already one
book that gives them double billing, historian David R. Contosta's
"Rebel Giants," with another coming early next year from New Yorker
writer Adam Gopnik. Contosta's joint biography doesn't turn up
anything new, but the biographical parallels he sets forth are enough
to make us see each man afresh. Both lost their mothers in early
childhood. Both suffered from depression (Darwin also suffered from a
variety of crippling stomach ailments and chronic headaches), and both
wrestled with religious doubt. Each had a strained relationship with
his father, and each of them lost children to early death. Both spent
the better part of their 20s trying to settle on a career, and neither
man gave much evidence of his future greatness until well into middle
age: Darwin published "The Origin of Species" when he was 50, and
Lincoln won the presidency a year later. Both men were private and
guarded. Most of Darwin's friendships were conducted through the mail,
and after his five-year voyage on HMS Beagle as a young man, he rarely
left his home in the English countryside. Lincoln, though a much more
public man, carefully cultivated a bumpkin persona that encouraged
both friends and enemies to underestimate his considerable, almost
Machiavellian skill as a politician.

It is a measure of their accomplishments, of how much they changed the
world, that the era into which Lincoln and Darwin was born seems so
strange to us now. On their birth date, Thomas Jefferson had three
weeks left in his second term as president. George III still sat on
the throne of England. The Enlightenment was giving way to
Romanticism. At the center of what people then believed, the tent
poles of their reality were that God created the world and that man
was the crown of creation. Well, some men, since the institution of
slavery was still acceptable on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line—it
would not be abolished in New York state, for example, until 1827, and
while it had been illegal in England since 1772, it would not be
abolished in English colonies until 1833. And Darwin, at least at the
outset, was hardly even a scientist in the sense that we understand
the term—a highly trained specialist whose professional vocabulary is
so arcane that he or she can talk only to other scientists.

Darwin, the man who would almost singlehandedly redefine biological
science, started out as an amateur naturalist, a beetle collector, a
rockhound, a 22-year-old rich-kid dilettante who, after flirting with
the idea of being first a physician and then a preacher, was allowed
to ship out with the Beagle as someone who might supply good
conversation at the captain's table. His father had all but ordered
him not to go to sea, worrying that it was nothing more than one of
Charles's lengthening list of aimless exploits—years before, Dr.
Darwin had scolded his teenage son, saying, "You care for nothing but
shooting, dogs, and rat catching, and you will be a disgrace to
yourself and all your family." How could the father know that when the
son came ashore after his five-year voyage, he would not only have
shed his aimlessness but would have replaced it with a scientific
sense of skepticism and curiosity so rigorous and abiding that he
would be a workaholic almost to the day he died? Darwin was also in
the grip of an idea so subversive that he would keep it under wraps
for another two decades. But the crucial thing is that he did all this
by himself. He became the very model of a modern major scientist
without benefit of graduate school, grants or even much peer review.
(It's hard to get a sympathetic hearing when your work, if successful,
is clearly going to knock the blocks out from under civilization.)
Darwin may have been independently wealthy, but in terms of his
vocation, he was a self-made man.

Lincoln was self-made in the more conventional sense—a walking,
talking embodiment of the frontier myth made good. Like Darwin,
Lincoln was not a quick study. Both men worked slowly to master a
subject. But both had restless, hungry minds. After about a year of
schooling as a boy—and that spread out in dribs and drabs of three
months here and four months there—Lincoln taught himself. He mastered
trigonometry (for work as a surveyor), he read Blackstone on his own
to become a lawyer. He memorized swaths of the Bible and Shakespeare.
At the age of 40, after he had already served a term in the U.S. House
of Representatives, he undertook Euclidean geometry as a mental
exercise. After a while, his myth becomes a little much—he actually
was born in a log cabin with a dirt floor—so much that we begin
looking for flaws, and they're there: the bad marriage, some maladroit
comments on racial inferiority. Then there were those terrible jokes.
But even there, dammit, he could be truly witty: "I have endured a
great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great
deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it."

Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of this riddlesome man was just how
he managed, somewhere along the way, to turn himself into one of the
best prose writers America has produced. Lincoln united the North
behind him with an eloquence so timeless that his words remain fresh
no matter how many times you read them. Darwin wrote one of the few
scientific treatises, maybe the only one, worth reading as a work of
literature. Both of them demand to be read in the original, not in
paraphrase, because both men are so much in their prose. To read them
is to know these elusive figures a little better. Given their
influence on our lives, these are men you want to know.

Darwin seems to have been able to think only with a pen in his hand.
He was a compulsive note taker and list maker. He made an extensive
list setting down the pros and cons of marriage before he proposed to
his future wife. His first published work, "The Voyage of the Beagle,"
is a tidied-up version of the log he kept on the five-year trip around
the world, and he is unflaggingly meticulous in his observations of
the plant and animal life he saw or collected along the way. To live,
for Darwin, meant looking and examining and then writing down what he
saw and then trying to make sense of it.

__ Read the rest at http://www.newsweek.com/id/143742

Rodjk #613

Bodega · Guest

On Jun 29, 6:42 pm, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote:

phillip brown · Guest

On Jun 30, 11:29 am, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote:

phillip brown · Guest

On Jun 30, 1:03 pm, Bodega <michael.palm...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:

Guest · Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 5:40 am Post subject: Re: MSNBC on Lincoln and Darwin

On Jun 29, 9:43 pm, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote:

raven1 · Guest

On Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:40:14 -0700 (PDT), "Rodjk #613"
<rjkardo@gmail.com> wrote:

Steven L. · Guest

raven1 wrote:

John Wilkins · Guest

raven1 <quoththeraven@nevermore.com> wrote:

John Wilkins · Guest

Steven L. <sdlitvin@earthlink.net> wrote:

John Harshman · Guest

John Wilkins wrote:

phillip brown · Guest

On Jun 30, 3:47 pm, "Mike Dworetsky"
<platinum...@pants.btinternet.com> wrote:

John Wilkins · Guest

John Harshman <jharshman.diespamdie@pacbell.net> wrote:

Free Lunch · Guest

On Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:43:40 +1000, j.wilkins1@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins)
wrote in talk.origins:

John Wilkins · Guest

Free Lunch <lunch@nofreelunch.us> wrote:

Mike Dworetsky · Guest

"phillip brown" <pjbrown@people.net.au> wrote in message
news:5b44feda-45cf-4710-99b0-bf5a1c01edb4@p39g2000prm.googlegroups.com...