In honor of Charles Darwin

In honor of Charles Darwin's upcoming 200th birthday on February 12, there has been increased interest in the life of Darwin.

Darwin coincidentally shares a birthday with Abraham Lincoln. Smithsonian's latest issue features a series of articles on the achievements of Darwin and Lincoln as well as an article on what the two men share in common. The article reads:

The two boys born on the same day into such different lives had become, as they remain, improbable public figures of that alteration of minds—they had become what are now called in cliché "icons," secular saints. They hadn't made the change, but they had helped to midwife the birth. With the usual compression of popular history, their reputations have been reduced to single words, mottoes to put beneath a profile on a commemorative coin or medal: "Evolution!" for one and "Emancipation!" for the other... We're not wrong to work these beautiful words onto their coins, though: they were the engineers of the alterations. They found a way to make those words live. Darwin and Lincoln did not make the modern world. But, by becoming "icons" of free human government and slow natural change, they helped to make our moral modernity.

National Geographic also had an article on Darwin this month. What Darwin Didn't Know covers some of the innovations and scientific discoveries made since Darwin's time. (Interestingly enough, Smithsonian features an article of the same name, also in its February issue.) The National Geographic article says:

Darwin's greatest idea was that natural selection is largely responsible for the variety of traits one sees among related species. Now, in the beak of the finch and the fur of the mouse, we can actually see the hand of natural selection at work, molding and modifying the DNA of genes and their expression to adapt the organism to its particular circumstances.

The New York Times even has a recent series of articles on Darwin in, of all places, the book section. The section features an excerpt of a book on Darwin's views of slavery and how it shaped his discovery of natural selection and an excerpt from a book on the similarities between Darwin and Abraham Lincoln.