The Big Two-Oh-Oh

In a coincidence not quite as remarkable as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dying on the same day, the 50th anniversary of America’s Independence, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day 200 years ago.

Who was more influential and important to world history? Who would I rather have dinner with? These are tough questions that I will gladly ignore.

We can thank Lincoln for defending republican liberty:

Lincoln was clearly motivated by something other than the dictator’s desire for power. During the Civil War, he sought to save the Constitution and the Union, but only because they were the means of preserving that most precious of goods, republican liberty [ed- note that the most precious good isn't "democracy"]. It is with this end in mind, and with an understanding of the nature of prudence, that we can properly understand Lincoln’s actions as commander-in-chief.

Lincoln is probably more emotionally stirring for me. See if this part of his July 10, 1858 speech gives you any goose bumps.

We are now a mighty nation, we are thirty—or about thirty millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years and we discover that we were then a very small people in point of numbers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a vastly less extent of country,—with vastly less of everything we deem desirable among men,—we look upon the change as exceedingly advantageous to us and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that happened away back, as in some way or other being connected with this rise of prosperity. We find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us. We hold this annual celebration to remind ourselves of all the good done in this process of time of how it was done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it; and we go from these [Independence Day] meetings in better humor with ourselves—we feel more attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live for these celebrations. But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration [loud and long continued applause], and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world. [Applause.]

But I’m a sucker for any story that mentions an aspect of Evolution (which isn’t just a theory) that I haven’t heard of before. So Darwin wins the battle for intellectual stimulation.

Until recently, conventional wisdom held that human beings had mastered their environment so thoroughly that the imperative to evolve in many ways diminished about 10,000 years ago, when agriculture gave rise to more-stable societies.

“People thought that with technology and culture, there’d be no reason for physical things to make any difference,” said Milford Wolpoff, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Michigan. “If you can ride a horse, it doesn’t matter if you can run fast.”

That turned out to be wrong. As it happens, the pace of evolution has been speeding up — not slowing down — in the 40,000 years since our ancestors fanned out from Ethiopia to populate the globe.

And in the 5,000 to 10,000 years since agriculture triggered the growth of large societies, the pace has accelerated to 100 times historical levels.

“When there’s more people, there are more mutations,” Wolpoff said. “And when there are more mutations, there’s more selection.”

…

Diet is another big force behind recent human evolution. As humans made the transition from being hunter-gatherers to farmers, their bodies had to adapt to new kinds of foods.

The best-known example involves the gene that regulates a person’s ability to make an enzyme required to digest lactose, the sugar in milk. Historically, the LCT gene shut down in early childhood as babies were weaned off breast milk. But after cows, sheep and goats were domesticated, people with a mutation that allowed them to drink milk as adults had a nutritional advantage that made it easier for them to propagate their genes.

DNA analyses have shown that the mutation cropped up in Europe about 8,000 years ago, and quickly spread all the way to India. Today, it is carried by more than 95% of people of Northern European descent.

Good stuff. Happy Birthday Boys!