Originally Posted by Duvidoo

When was Darwin ever President?
I don't think he ever even ran for office.
The Galapagos Islands are wonderful.
Love those giant tortoises.

Originally Posted by HarperLee

Can't there just be an Eman thread?

Originally Posted by Environment Man

Eman thinks Lincoln was okay, but Darwin was way off base. Obama would agree. For Obama identifies with Lincoln and pimps Darwin. [Note the Obama walk]

Newsweek describes how Lincoln and Darwin were born in the same day in 1809. But concludes that Lincoln was the more important historical figure. Eman agrees.

Both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day in 1809, and were thus about to mark their bicentennials. What about a little essay, Marc said, on the two men?

For me, the idea was like Christmas in May: two towering figures who had shaped the way we live now, redefining politics and science and philosophy and—well, just about everything else, too. A cover, I thought, that's the cover—Lincoln vs. Darwin: Who Mattered More? They are venerated figures (and, in Darwin's case, much maligned), men whose examples still inspire and instruct.

Not a few politicians have sought solace in the image of Lincoln's struggle to save the Union; not a few scientists and philosophers have found a model in Darwin's intellectual curiosity and devotion to data. What links them for our purposes is that they are essential elements of the story of the world we inhabit. (If you want to get technical about it, you can raise the reasonable point that it is an unanswerable question, but that's no fun. We do hazard an answer, and expect a lot of you to disagree—which is, in a way, one of the points of the exercise.)

SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT DARWIN:

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.

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.

Originally Posted by RK77

You read this article and this is as deep and involved as your thoughts on it got? Pitiful. Truly pitiful.