Darwin or Lincoln?

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

While others might have had similar ideas to Darwin (such as Alfred Russell Wallace) without the decades long research of Darwin the theory might not have been as accepted as it was. The theory of evolution was a hugely important landmark in scientific development.

Lincoln was only the (very eloquent) spokesperson for the already large and zealous abolitionist movement, and not even their first choice for that, being a compromise candidate for the 1860 election. The movement to abolish slavery would have gone on without Lincoln, but evolution would have been decades away from scientific prominence without Darwin.

Lincoln wasn't a spokesperson for the abolitionist movement. He didn't even run as an abolitionist. But that makes him more, rather than less relevant.  If the Republicans had nominated Seward or some other fire-breather, there's a good chance that they wouldn't have won the EV and Douglass would probably have been chosen by the House.

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Lincoln. Darwin's work was a lot more far-reaching, but it is also a lot more easily manipulated to support some truly evil causes. See Hitler's Germany.

That's a gross oversimplification. Nazi Germany would likely have still come about in a similar form even without evolutionary theory being available. Hitler also used religion to manipulate people, and it's not like using Jews as a scapegoat for social ills was a new phenomenon in Europe.

Also, you can't blame the manipulation of legitimate science to fit into some twisted ideology on the scientists when they aren't the ones manipulating it.

It's worth noting that Nazi racial theory was technically Lamarckist if anything. In terms of Hitler’s racial theory Darwinism or any concepts associated with it are not found in Mein Kampf. The core of his views of the difference between the Aryan and the Jews is essentially biblical. He was attracted to the idea of progeny, not in Darwinian terms but through the concept of ‘blood lines’ and associated blood libel.

“I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord"

Guidelines from ‘Die Bucherie’ in 1935 placed, ‘writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism’ in a list of banned books. As well as ‘all writings that ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion and its institution, faith in God, or other things that are holy to the healthy sentiments of the Volk.’

There is no biblical concept of the Aryan.  Hitler's anti-Semitism was modern in its defining of Jewishness by race rather than by religious affiliation.  He tapped into the anti-Jew tradition that extended back through the medieval era, but without the nationalism and race science of the modern era you can't arrive at anything that looks like Nazism.