Come on, you have to say "Wow!" unless you knew it already; 12 February 2009, is the joint 200th birth anniversary of the man who revolutionised natural science and America’s 16th president. When months ago I circulated an effusive e-mail on Mozart’s 250th birthday a friend poured electronic cold water declaring: "I’d rather listen to heavy metal" - animal! Reluctantly, therefore, I now have to keep a lid on my natural euphoria.

Odds and ends

When at the end of its voyage (1831-1836), the Beagle docked in Plymouth one of mankind’s greatest journeys of discovery was done, though the findings would go unreported for 23 more years – till 1859. And a continent away, the Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862, acclaimed the end of slavery in the Confederate States of America; then, in less than a century and a half, a black man sits in the White House built by slaves; the first ever black-man headman of a white-man country. Come on, say, "Wow!" or are you silent because this same America chose a moron, not once but twice, only just previously?

And what about humour? An anonymous Afro-American poet had this charming summary of the Genesis creation story.

To change the pace, Abe Lincoln had a dry sense of humour and a quick wit. There are many authenticated stories of his repartee. Here are two reliable anecdotes relating to his gangly pokerfaced appearance. One day a female journalist called him "two faced", turning his unappealing visage to her he replied: "If I had another face, Madam, would I be wearing this one?" And there’s another true story that Lincoln the young lawyer was stopped by a man who stuck a revolver in his face and swore "A long time ago I swore that if I ever met an uglier man than myself, I’d shoot him". Passers by disarmed the man, but not before Abe had responded: "Well, go ahead, if I’m uglier than you, I don’t want to live".

Who is the greater of the two?

Darwin changed the world, Lincoln, America – so the question is answered. To say that Charles Darwin is the greatest scientist since Isaac Newton will be considered a truism by many; but how exactly did he change the world, why was he so afraid to publish his results for over two decades? The second question is easier to answer though the commonly held view is incorrect, or more accurately, incomplete. It is popularly thought that Darwin was worried that since his concepts of origin of species and survival by natural selection contradicted the Genesis story, he was afraid of the church.

There was more to it than that, much more. Darwin clearly understood that what he was putting forward was a materialist explanation of the natural world and of man. He was not just challenging a silly old story in the first chapter of the Old Testament; no, he knew that his was a profoundly different philosophical basis of human epistemology. And indeed, this is why all hell broke loose when the Origin was published. The problem was not Genesis, the problem was: What is the epistemological underpinning of science and philosophy – was it materialism or something else snatched from the world of thought and spiritual discourse? Marx, contemporaneously, shouted materialism from the rooftops, but he could be safely ignored, his domain was radical politics and imprecise economics. But Darwin’s case was different; it hit at the very solar plexus – the nature of scientific knowledge itself.

Despite the urgings of Thomas Huxley, Charles Leyell, Joseph Dalton Hooker and many brilliant scientists thronged around him for over twenty long years, Darwin was afraid to publish his audacious, nay scandalous, thesis. He was also afraid of the effect both the theory, and the inevitable controversy thereafter, would have on his wife Emma (nee Wedgwood), a devout Christian. Nevertheless, he was working on his book when a shattering event occurred on 28 June 1858; he received a letter from a relatively obscure naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who was then collecting species in Borneo. Wallace included in his letter an essay entitled "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type" which was amazingly similar to Darwin’s conceptions. What Wallace did not have was the mechanism of the ‘Tendency’, natural selection through the struggle for survival, nor Darwin’s copious evidence substantiating the evolutionary process. But he had, speculatively, hit upon an idea and publication-wise seemed to have trumped Darwin to the finishing post. After being convinced by those around him that honour did not require him to give first place to Wallace for his inspired guess, Lyell and Hooker arranged to have portions of Darwin’s notebooks and Wallace’s essay read together before the Linnaean Society on 1 July1858. At first it hardly caused a stir.

Buddhism would have faced no such crisis in assimilating the findings of Darwinian natural science. Its objective of ever deepening and widening the understanding of self and the surrounding world, its demand to banish illusion - surely inclusive of setting aside the old and absorbing new knowledge - and its concepts of impermanence and flux, makes it comfortable with accommodating expanding horizons of knowledge. Those Buddhists who preach that the Buddha knew everything, from quantum physics to modern genetics are silly and missing the point because Buddhism is not a closed system but an outlook willing to assimilate the new, including what is new to itself.

Lincoln’s claim to greatness

In his time Lincoln was no less reviled than Darwin and eventually he paid a higher price. He detested slavery, but was chosen for the Republican nomination because he was considered more politically moderate on the issue than his rivals. He did win the 1860 presidential elections but polled only 39%, there was virtually no campaigning in the South except for a few border cities, and indeed, the Republicans did not even run a slate in most of the South. Even before his inauguration, South Carolina and six cotton-growing slave states in the deep-south declared independence from the Union and constituted themselves as the Confederate States of America in December 1860. Civil war broke out in April 1861.

Though there is no doubt that Lincoln loathed slavery his primary concern in the early 1860s was the preservation of the Union in the civil war. Controversially, this statement appeared in his August 1862 article in the New York Tribune.

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the coloured race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union".

However, this needs to be understood in context. By mid-1862 Lincoln had decided that he could not win the civil war without freeing the slaves and already had the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation in his pocket. Hence this was a shrewd statement designed to win over opinion in the south towards his war effort. Nevertheless, it is true to say that Lincoln’s claim to greatness should rest less on the abolition of slavery than his role as the man who won the civil war, made shrewd and timely compromises, and showed magnanimity in victory; in short, as the architect of modern unified America. Obama, then, is right in believing that his hero is indeed the greatest president of the United States, but perhaps not quite for the reason he dotes upon.

There are some common characteristics between Lincoln and Obama. Lincoln was a superb orator, brevity and pith were his forte (Gettysburg for example) but he was capable of stunning intellectual performances such as when he addressed a high society New York gathering at Cooper Union in February 1860, several months before the elections. Hmm an interesting parallel with another stunning intellectual tour de force on race relations at the Philadelphia Constitution Centre, several months before the election, in March 2008. (Obama borrowed its title, ‘A More Perfect Union’, from the preamble to the US Constitution). There is another similarity; they are both so supremely self-confident, that it has been said of cabinet choices, that they embrace their friends closely, and their enemies closer. And then there is the obvious one, from time to time and not too often America puts intellectuals in the seat of power; it did so in 1860, in 2008 and a few times in between.

Neo-Darwinism and contemporary knowledge

Neo-Darwinism is the term used to describe the coming together of evolution theory and genetics. Though basic genetics had been proved during Darwin’s lifetime in the experiments of Gregor Johan Mendel (1822-1884), an obscure Austro-Silesian monk, the theory remained unknown to the scientific community at large for several decades. Rediscovered in the early 20th Century it was brought into fusion with Darwinian evolution to provide a reliable quantitative theory of mutation, evolutionary change and species transmutation. When DNA, the chemical structure of the double helix and the storage system of genetic information was discovered in February 1953, it not only put the icing on the cake, but also released an explosion of energy into medical and fundamental scientific research. The importance for science and medicine of this breakout is impossible to overestimate and the final chapter will be written only some generations down the road.

Neo-Darwinism and relativistic quantum physics are the two pillars on which modern science stands; they are the two foundations without which most of natural science and biology on the one hand, and physical science and astrophysics on the other make no sense.