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Recently, someone here at Smithsonian asked: Who was more important, Abraham Lincoln or Charles Darwin? Yesterday, senior editor T.A. Frail took up the fight for Lincoln. Today, our blog overseer, senior editor Laura Helmuth, argues for Darwin.

Please add your own arguments to the comments. Make a convincing case and I might recruit you into our little office blog war.

Laura Helmuth:

Abe Lincoln? Love him. Best president ever. The most inspiring spot in Washington, D.C. is the Lincoln Memorial–stand there in a crowd sometime and read the Second Inaugural etched into the wall and listen to all the sniffles.

There are two ways to approach this debate: either argue about whose accomplishments were more important or argue about how necessary each man was to those accomplishments. To take the last point first, it’s true that the abolition movement was growing stronger and eventually would have prevailed without Lincoln. (I’m not going to wade into the debate about whether the Union would have survived without him.) Likewise, knowledge of the natural world was growing and somebody would have (and Wallace pretty much did) figured out evolution by natural selection if Darwin hadn’t. (But it sure helped that Darwin gathered data meticulously and presented his case so logically. Even though his carefulness was due in part to the fact that he knew his Great Idea had the potential to upset the church, the scientific establishment, and the missus (Emma Darwin was devout).)

I prefer the first line of argument. And how to say this nicely… Lincoln may matter in our measly little lives, but Darwin matters to the entire world and all time. He explained everything that came before him and explains everything that has been learned since. Lincoln worked wonders with his one country, but Darwin allowed us to make sense of all of life on Earth (and presumably any other planet).

Mark, Sarah, and commenters–you guys go ahead and clear this up for us. I’m going to the Galapagos to find some finches.

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Eastern Himalaya Mountains (NASA/USGS)

The recent cold spell is getting a lot of attention, but we should all remember that it could be worse. At least we don’t live in the Himalayas where, for example, the temperatures in June at the Everest Base Camp are just around freezing (and -13 degrees Fahrenheit at the summit!).

This picture, though, isn’t of the great mountain but of the mountain ridges of the eastern Himalayas in southwestern China. The 2001 photo was taken by the ASTER instrument aboard NASA’s Terra satellite and can be found in the USGS Earth as Art 2 collection of satellite imagery.

Next month we celebrate an odd double anniversary—the 200th anniversaries of the births of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Yes, they were born on the same day. And being that history and science are two of our favorite topics at Smithsonian, someone asked: Who was more important, Lincoln or Darwin?

Over the next week or so, we’ll attempt to answer that question. (Newsweek took a swipe at it last summer. Their conclusion? Lincoln.) Siding with Lincoln are two of the magazine’s senior editors, T.A. Frail and Mark Strauss. And arguing for Darwin will be senior editor and blog overseer Laura Helmuth and myself. Who will win?

Please add your own arguments to the comments. Make a convincing case and I might recruit you into our little office blog war.

First up, T.A. Frail:

Lincoln outweighing Darwin, in the historical-grativas department? Darwin outstripping Lincoln? It’s like arguing Lennon/McCartney versus Jagger/Richards. But I think the question is inevitable: when you have giants striding the earth at the same time, they’re going to bump into each other, metaphorically or otherwise.

And I vote for: It depends.

Oh, wait—I meant Lincoln. Yes, Darwin came up with the means to explain life on earth. He exemplified the modern scientific modern. He keelhauled humankind’s understanding of itself on a scale not seen since Copernicus. But his work was about life in the abstract—processes and aeons. I prefer Lincoln because his work was about living—about nations and relations. Like Darwin, his work raised the question of who we are, but in the context of how we were going to get along with one another. Darwin explained how life became. Lincoln set a course for what we could become. I’ll go with that….

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Mountain gorillas are rare and endangered, and they have the misfortune to live in a part of the world wracked by human violence. In the magazine in 2007, we focused on the gorillas of Congo and Rwanda, giving little attention to the 350 living in neighboring Uganda. But the Ugandan gorillas may not be doing as well as we thought.

Mountain gorillas in Uganda (courtesy of Flickr user Stefan Gara)

In Uganda, researchers have usually estimated mountain gorilla numbers through counts of nests (the gorillas build the nests each night and sleep in them). But a group of scientists used a new method to count the gorillas within Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda and discovered that the traditional counting method may be inaccurate (the results were published last month in the journal Biological Conservation). The scientists, led by Katerina Guschanski of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, obtained DNA from 384 fecal samples collected at the nest sites so they could assign individuals to each nest (as least by their dung sample). They report: “We found that both groups and lone silverbacks were double-counted in the field and that individuals constructed multiple nests with an overall rate of 7.8%, resulting in the overestimation of the population size in the absence of genetic data.” By their calculations, there are only 302 mountain gorillas in the park.

From New Scientist:

“We assumed that each individual constructs a single nest, but genetic analysis shows that several individuals construct more than one nest,” says Guschanski. This has been observed in studies of lowland gorillas, who construct more than one nest if the original nest starts leaking during a rainstorm, or if a youngster finds the one that it has just built uncomfortable, she adds…. It might also mean that the gorilla population in the park is not growing after all–a census in 1997 found 300 gorillas, while one in 2003 found 320 individuals, but these figures may also be inaccurate. “Now we don’t really know what is happening with this population,” says Guschanski. “Probably the safest thing is to assume that the population is stable, but we will need to wait for another four to five years to assess how it is changing.”

As for the mountain gorillas in Congo, we may have new population numbers soon. The rangers of Virunga National Park are now conducting a census of the mountain gorillas under their care (and they are blogging the results of their searches). Among the good news—the Rugendo family that we reported had been massacred in 2007 has grown from five individuals to nine.

Mist in Germany (courtesy of Flickr user abhijeet.rane)

After coming home from the National Mall, where I froze my butt off watching the fun, I discovered that there’s been quite a bit of interesting science news in the last few days:

The New York Times profiled scientists studying avalanches.

PZ Myers over at Pharyngula found carnivorous sea squirts in Australia, the land where everything will kill you. (Australian John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts then provided advice on surviving his continent.)

That romantic mist in Europe, well, it’s diminishing, which is contributing to rising temperatures there.

Abu Dhabi made a commitment to move toward green energy.

Scientific American’s 60-Second Science asked whether tungsten could be harmful, like mercury and lead.

Scientists think there might be a link between water pollution and the increasing rate of male fertility problems.

Rebecca Skloot at the Culture Dish discussed the flaws in the famed “six degrees of separation” study.

And just in case you missed it, President Obama gave science a nice shout out in his inaugural address:

We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise healthcare’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

This wouldn’t seem to be a section likely to draw applause, but there were hundreds of people cheering the words where I was standing on the grounds of the Washington Monument. And they were all strangers to me.