Of course Darwin wins this (admittedly odd) competition.
This idea that scientific discovery is arbitrary, and that anyone could have done it is nonsense. Scientific progress has never been an ever upward path. Theories can be ignored for hundreds of years, others can be forgotten for similar periods. You absolutely cannot say that without Darwin we would, now, have a similar understanding of our place in the world.
Ideas will always win over actions. This is like comparing Pericles (a hugely important leader) to Plato.
I’m still not sure why because Darwin was in the right place at the right time (and went and studied the right things) that he is disqualified. Whilst Lincoln being in the right place and the right time (and doing the right things) qualifies him.
Theoretical biology doesn’t impact the world much at all.
Lincoln, like Kennedy, was assassinated, and that tends to make greater than life figures out of American Presidents. If Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated, I think he would have put pressure to the carpet baggers, to alleviate some of the bad feelings.
Lincoln didn’t do all that much for civil rights, but he was a rarity. He was a president with common sense. President doesn’t run the country. Congress does.
He did do a lot, but he recognized it was a battle of time and not something to rush. The Radical Republican block was trying to push things through much too fast, but Lincoln was able to hold them back enough that they didn’t freak out the rest of the country. People were coming to a new appreciation of Americans descended from black slaves. Lincoln encouraged it, but only in subtle ways, like relaxing old restrictions on blacks in the capital. I believe Lincoln was the first President to receive a black man while in office; it was Frederick Douglas. Likewise, in a very cunning move, he made Salmon Chase the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. This mollified the powerful politician after his failed Presidential bid and put a Radical Republican watchdog into the best place he could be.
Lincoln was in the thick of a lot of things. I don’t doubt that he could have, had he surrendered everything to it, pushed black equality farther along. However, it would have neccessitated comprimises in other areas which were likely to be much worse on the balance. Had he lived he would undoubtedly have been able to better manage the Republican coalition and helped calm the South. Though he was in some respects hated there, the people also pretty well respected him; he’d just kicked their butts.
The question asks who had more impact on the world.
Lincoln, kept the United States together at great cost to deliver the world a superpower That has influenced the very lives of every man woman and child on the planet. Instead of the ideologies of Russia, Nazi Germany, or Imperial Japan dominating the world, we have what we have the political landscape today including all the technological advances generated by the powerful economy of the US.
Not to take anything away from Darwin, but explain to me how different our lives would be without Darwin.
The last 150 years are but a moment in the history of man, and if the question is asked again in a 1000 years it may well be that Lincoln’s contribution will become irrelevant. Darwin’s contribution will stand as long as we have a civilization on the planet.
Actually the question was who impacted the world more. I’m still doing to have to go with Darwin on this one. He’s the one figure that seems to make fundamentalist want to shit a brick, or at least they look and sound like they want to shit a brick, but Darwin’s magical theory of natural selection is somehow causing bowel obstructions. In sharp contrast, thinking about Lincoln causes no such bowel obstructions.
Odesio
not to hijack the thread too much, but can we play a little ‘alternative history’ to try to judge Lincoln’s greatness?
Suppose he had never even fought the civil war. Let the South secede, and then forget about it.
The South would have become an unimportant country along the southern border, like Mexico.
The rest of America still succeed; it would never suffer huge costs (human and financial) of the civil war,and go on as a unified culture, to develop the west, build a strong industrial base, a strong army. Later, Thomas Edison would still provide electric power and Bill Gates would create Microsoft. Lincoln was a great president. But America could still have become a great nation and a superpowerwithout him --it would just be made of 38 states instead of 50.
I already partly explained that in my last post, which you seemed to have missed. Are you going to retract your ignorant claim that the theory of evolution has no practical application, now?
Because he would then be carrying out a suggestion that was issued in violation of the rules of this Forum.
This is a Warning to refrain from this activity in the future.
= = =
That said, Cap’n Ridley & Co., your post was unnecessarily provocative and you would do well to show a bit more circumspection in your posts in this Forum.
[ /Moderating ]
Evolution would’ve been conceived by someone at more or less the same time even without Darwin (and indeed it was). Granted Wallace might have not been as comfortable as Darwin in linking evolution to the descent of humans, but presumably others would’ve been, and history would’ve progressed more or less the same.
Would the US have won, or even fought the Civil War without Lincoln. Probably impossible to know, but I’d say its at least conceivable things would’ve shaken out differently, so I’d say Lincoln pretty clearly had more of an effect on history then Darwin.
But the fact that somebody other than Darwin may have invented the concept of natural is irrelevant to the question “who was more influential between Lincoln and Darwin”! We aren’t discussing who was the most irreplaceable, rather the most influential.
Darwin was the originator of the theory, he spent a lifetime collecting irrefutable evidence for his theory, and finally published a book that caused a controversy on the subject after having his hand forced by the Wallace letter.