Happy Birthday Darwin: You haven't changed a bit

Today is the 200 year anniversary of Darwin's (and Lincoln's) Birth. There are celebrations going on all over the world, and some great collections of information on Darwin are out there.

One little known commonality between the two great men, beyond their birth, was their view on Slavery.
To Quote Darwin.
“I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernamabuco, I heard the most pitiful moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate."
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Lincoln is famous for his role in ending slavery within the US, and now the impact of the slave trade on Darwin's theories is examined in a recent book.

While Darwin hasn't changed much since his death (funny that), Evolutionary Theory certainly has grown since he first proposed it. The addition of Genetic Science has taken our understanding of Evolution to places that Darwin never suspected. On that note, here is some of the latest Science on the Evolution of Humans (Homo Sap) and the disappearance of the Neanderthals. Through reconstruction of the Neanderthal genome researchers have determined that there was little, if any interbreeding between the two species.

One thing we did have in common, however, was the same variant of the FOXP2 gene known to play a role in speech. So it's possible that we communicated, but in the end, some 30,000 years ago, they ended as a race and we remained. Intellectually it's easy to say our ancestors (Cro-Magnon) were smarter, more able hunters, and better suited to the environment than Neanderthal was. Emotionally though I have to wonder what the reality of "Survival of the Fittest" was between two species so similar that they may have shared languages or even cultures if not beds.