Here’s a coincidence I didn’t know about until today: the scientist Charles Darwin and the US President Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day, February 12, 1809.
Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, and introduced the theory of natural selection. he initially studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, but switched to natural science and did most of his research independently. He didn’t bother going to classes because they bored him, and his father pulled him out of school and sent him to Christ’s College in Cambridge instead, to study to become a parson. Those classes bored him too, but his second cousin William Fox was also enrolled, and Darwin got very interested in Fox’s butterfly collection. Darwin began both studying entomology and collecting beetles — and managed to get some of his work on beetles published.
Despite being bored by classes, Darwin sat for the graduation exam six months early and passed, coming in tenth out of 178 students. But he had to remain at school until June, so he spent the time studying natural philosophy and geology. He planned to travel after graduation to somewhere in “the tropics” to study the animals and geology there. But his plans were interrupted by an invitation to join the HMS Beagle on an expedition to chart the coastline of South America. His father thought it was a waste of time, but agreed to fund his trip.
The voyage of the Beagle was planned to last two years but stretched out to five. Darwin had made sure to retain ownership of anything he collected on the trip, and he collected a lot, from ocean invertebrates to beetles to specimens of rock. It must have been a difficult time for him in at least one respect: he suffered from seasickness the whole time.
Meanwhile, in the US, Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Kentucky, which in those days was the frontier of the US. He became a self-educated lawyer, and was elected to several political offices in the 1830s, while Darwin was aboard the Beagle. Lincoln opposed slavery, and by coincidence Darwin’s grandfathers were both active abolitionists.
Lincoln left politics for several years, but returned in 1854 when the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed slavery in the new US territories. He emerged as a national leader in 1858 when he debated Stephen Douglas during his campaign for the US Senate. He ran for president two years later and won, at a time when the southern states of the US began seceding because of the threat to slavery, which they believed their economy depended on. It was about the same time that Darwin finally published his theory of natural selection, which he had worked on for years.
Lincoln was president throughout the US Civil War, from 1861 to May, 1865, and the anti-slavery northern states won. Lincoln himself was assassinated by a pro-slavery zealot just before the war’s end, in April 1865. He was 56. Darwin’s life wasn’t marked by war or violence, and he lived to be 73. Lincoln is remembered as the greatest president of the US. Darwin is remembered as one of the most influential people in history. v
