Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day two centuries ago, thanks be to the false god of coincidence. But which, you cry, was the greater? Was it the man who transformed our understanding of the human race, or the man who made the mightiest nation on Earth also the custodian of liberty and democracy? Was it the scientist or the statesman?
Darwin claims the crown for the scale of his intellectual revolution, but was he no more than an observer, a describer, a cataloguer?
Did he not fail Marx's test, that any philosopher can interpret the world while "the point is to change it"? On the other hand, Lincoln may have ensured that America became a force for world freedom, but was he not just a lucky war leader, and of a cause whose time had anyway come?
The comparison is silly, but not the question. We can leave the two men as giants - except I suppose to a born-again Confederate creationist - but we can still set the pursuit of science against that of politics and ask which deserves the greater respect.
Science may nowadays enjoy the status of medieval religion, but writing in this week's TLS, the ultra-Darwinian, Richard Dawkins, still presents his cause as that of a persecuted fraternity. In Britain, he wails, "only 69% want evolution to be taught at all. In America 40% believe that life on Earth has existed in its present form since the beginning of time". He claims that science teachers are "under growing pressure from creationist lobbies, usually inspired by American or Islamic sources".
This is intellectual paranoia. The purported British figure of 31% "anti-evolutionist" probably reflects no more than an exasperation with boring science teaching. That is the fault of mis-selling by the currently all-powerful science lobby, not of Darwinism.
If any scientific cause can be said to have triumphed in the last half century it is that of evolution. As Dawkins points out: "The least you can say about evolutionary theory is that it works. All but pedants would go further and assert that it is true."
State subsidy to biological research dwarfs any tax relief to religious fundamentalists. The university megaliths spawned by Darwin's descendants mock the modest encampments of academic theology. Big science is very big. Darwin needs no apologists.
Where in comparison stands Lincoln? This waffling country lawyer was killed by a madman after just five years in office and before anyone could tell what he would make of reconstruction. He might be just another ambitious politician had Robert E Lee not made the fatal mistake of invading Pennsylvania and losing the civil war.
Lincoln's greatest stroke of luck was to have a reporter within earshot when he recited a few lines at the Gettysburg cemetery in 1863. They were to the unsensational effect that "government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the Earth". This was no more than had been asserted by the founding fathers, but the moment was apt.
Lincoln saved the northern continent of America from the Balkanisation that overtook the south and certainly hastened the freeing of the slaves, but union would have come in time, as would emancipation. He built a coalition able to resist separatism - a debatable goal these days - and bound his nation to a common purpose. But he was a symbolic figure in a continuum rather than a revolutionary.
Darwin was also part of a continuum. He built on the work of his grandfather, Erasmus, from whom he learned of biological variation and the survival of the fittest. As for natural selection, he came near to sharing the fate of Humphrey Gainsborough (co-inventor of the steam engine) and the early "discoverers" of America, in being almost beaten to the post by a rival biologist, in his case Alfred Russel Wallace. But this means only that history would have invented Darwin, as it would Lincoln, had they not existed.
A more vivid contrast is between their respective fields of endeavour. In the two centuries since Darwin's birth, the profession of biological science has progressed immeasurably. Not only did his discoveries break through barriers and smother prejudices, so did his method, his open-mindedness and readiness to free the eye to see nature afresh.
Politics has no such joyous narrative. Lincoln had only its crooked timber from which to work. His forerunner as president, John Adams, gloomily remarked: "While all other sciences have advanced, government is at a stand; little better practised now than three or four thousand years ago."
Barbara Tuchman's compendium of military disaster, The March of Folly, sits on my desk as a daily reminder of the truth of that remark. To her it was amazing that, "elsewhere than in government", men could have raised rocks to soaring cathedrals, woven silk from worms, forged symphonies from base metal, voyaged to the moon and controlled or eliminated disease.
To Tuchman, politics, even sanitised as statesmanship, seemed immune to such progress. Time and again - not least at present - the occupation of Lincoln has behaved in a way that seems no different from the chicanery of the Athenian demos.
This week alone we had to witness the British government testing to destruction Darwin's survival of the fittest. Gordon Brown continued to wreck the British economy by his squirming subservience to bankers, while Jacqui Smith was so terrified by press scrutiny of her expenses that she crushed reason with prejudice over drugs.
Compared with the dazzling horizons traversed by Darwin, Lincoln's world seems a squalid compromise, a sequence of reactionary policies, stupid wars, self-interest, cowardice and corruption, in which ever smaller men make ever greatest mistakes.
Yet just as comparing two men born on the same day is essentially silly, so is the pitting of science against politics. Science is a linear dialectic, from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, from evidence to conclusion. Its challenges are notionally resolved by recourse to facts.
Darwinians might feel threatened by religious fundamentalists, but the contest is of wisdom against fools.
Politics has no such angels on its side. Its arguments are rarely susceptible to evidence - other than from unread history. Its conflicts are visceral and concern the interest of groups, taxes, privileges and vendettas. Politics reflects the basest emotions, and resolving them is difficult beyond the imagining of science. When Auden opined that no poem had "saved one Jew from the gas chambers", he might have been speaking for science as much as for literature or art. Only politics has that power to hand.
I believe in the primacy of politics as a human activity for the simple reason that it is more important than anything else. Science must dance to its tune, not vice versa. The calibre of politicians is a crucial determinant of human happiness. Theirs is not a profession but the consummation of social activity.
That is why Darwin died in his bed and Lincoln to an assassin's bullet. That is why Darwin gets my admiration, but Lincoln gets my vote.
Simon Jenkins