Posted on 11/24/2008 5:17:35 AM PST by Ethan Clive Osgoode
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...
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
"The influence primarily responsible for the modern eugenics movement was the establishment of the doctrine of organic evolution following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859."- Samuel J. Holmes, Human Genetics, 1936, chapter 25.
Lincoln. Darwin is being discredited even by evolutionists.
I think the proper answer is supposed to be: Obama is most important.
No one believes in Darwinism anymore. It couldn’t compete with the other theories.
Lincoln was a godly man. Darwin was not.
Ergo Lincoln was more important.
Further, the history of the world would have been drastically altered had Lincoln not been president and kept the union together.
Had Darwin not been born, not a whit would have been different. He just gave evil people a scientific sounding platform to stand upon. They would have come up with another to justify their actions.
Again, Ergo Lincoln was more important.
Lincoln was also the first Republican president. Had he not become elected, the modern republican party might not have lasted. Who knows what abomination might have gained parity with the democrats?
Lonely and tortured man... he deserved better in his lifetime.
Darwinism didn’t work, so the alternative was to become a Creationist or come up with some other theory. In reality, none of them are 100% provable and all interpret the same evidence in different ways. One group hypothesizes punctuated equalibrium, another panspermia, another intelligent design, another creationism. Where your starting presuppositions are will likely indicate which view you will adopt.
BTW... a person can claim that Jehova told them to go on a killing spree, it doesn't mean God approves...
And don't forget that it was Charles Darwin's cousin and son that were the primary leaders of the eugenics movement.
Darwin was “important” in the way that Hitler, Marx or Stalin was “important”.
The results of his ideas had great impact on history - contributing highly to evil and cruel ways in which people treated one another and those who are different (”less evolved”).
ML/NJ
Which is better? Air or water?
Stupid question.
I believe that this is demonstrably true, except that his ideas contributed to the other three. Hitler certainly employed his own idea of ‘natural selection’ in the Darwinian sense coupled with Galton’s Eugenics (also heavily influenced by Darwin); and Marx and Stalin were of course adherents of Darwinism and Atheists.
Now that you bring that up, here's a little something from Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove:
It is perfectly obvious that accepting Darwin's theory of a universal struggle for life must tend to strengthen whatever tendencies people had beforehand to selfishness and domineering behavior towards their fellow humans. Hence it must tend to make them worse than they were before, and more likely to commit crimes: especially crimes of rapacity, or of cruelty, or of dominance for the sake of dominance.These considerations are exceedingly obvious. There was therefore never any excuse for the indignation and surprise with which Darwinians and neo-Darwinians have nearly always reacted whenever their theory is accused of being a morally subversive one. For the same reason there is, and always was, every justification for the people, beginning with Darwin's contemporaries, who made that accusation against the theory. Darwin had done his best to separate the theory from the matrix of murderous ideas in which previously it had always been set. But in fact, since the theory says what it does, there is a limit, and a limit easily reached, to how much can be done in the way of such a separation. The Darwinian theory of evolution IS an incitement to crime: that is simply a fact.
For example?
Who was more important? Darwin or the big bowel movement I last had? Probably the later because I at least was able to rid my body of toxins.
Wrong on both counts.
ML/NJ
If Darwin had come two centuries before-enough for eugenics to become accepted—there would have been no black people for Lincoln to free.
Ideas have consequences.
Whether the idea is that there is nothing special about the human being because he’s just an accident of environment and mutation and that some within the species, necessarily, are more advanced than others
or if the idea is that every human is a special creation of the Creator of the universe, equally loved by Him, and created for His glory.
Both of these ideas have consequences.
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