And (at least) one more follow-up to my post on Darwin: As we ramp up to his 200th birthday on February 12th, my beloved book-publishing industry is flooding the meme pool with books that, however tangentially, celebrate the great man.

In today’s NYT Book Review alone, books about:

• Darwin + slavery
• Darwin + Lincoln (same review)
• Darwin + art, beauty and aesthetics (reviewed by Anthony Gottlieb, a former colleague of mine at The Economist.)
• Darwin + America

All of which confirms that he was a safe choice as runner-up for my nomination as greatest thinker ever.

I say that with some embarrassment, since intellectual safety is hardly what readers of The Hannibal Blog show up expecting and demanding! So I will try to rescue my reputation, later today, by finally nominating my overall winner–plucking him out of what I believe is relative obscurity.