Honorable Mention

Yesterday, was Charles Darwin's 200th Birthday.
What I failed to report on was that it was also Abraham Lincoln's 200th Birthday. Darwin and Lincoln were both born on the same day, of the same year and were both revolutionaries in their own domains.

Last year, I came across an article that broke down their two lives into the commonalities and detailed their individual accomplishments. As fascinating as the article was, it was hard to end on a note of "coincidences" that bound them, but thus is the nature of their linkage.

The article was featured in Newsweek entitled "How Darwin and Lincoln Shaped Us"

Below is an excerpt from that article outlining some of the common similarities the two shared:

Both lost their mothers in early childhood. Both suffered from depression
(Darwin also suffered from a variety of crippling stomach ailments and chronic
headaches), and both wrestled with religious doubt. Each had a strained
relationship with his father, and each of them lost children to early death.
Both spent the better part of their 20s trying to settle on a career, and
neither man gave much evidence of his future greatness until well into middle
age: Darwin published "The Origin of Species" when he was 50, and Lincoln won
the presidency a year later. Both men were private and guarded. Most of Darwin's
friendships were conducted through the mail, and after his five-year voyage on
HMS Beagle as a young man, he rarely left his home in the English countryside.
Lincoln, though a much more public man, carefully cultivated a bumpkin persona
that encouraged both friends and enemies to underestimate his considerable,
almost Machiavellian skill as a politician.(...)

Another good resource if you're interested in learning more about the two is a Short book entitled Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life by Adam Gopnik.

If you're interested in this sort of stuff whatsoever, I highly recommend reading the article. A very fascinating article about two very fascinating men.