Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln will share their 200th birthdays on Feb 12.

No other day in history had two more world-changing births than Feb. 12, 1809. That’s the date that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born an ocean apart in Hardin County, Ky., and Shrewsbury, England.

(In case you’re thinking about the birthday of the world’s most famous twins, neither the Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen nor Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren combos would seem to stack up.)

Other than their birth date, perhaps the most significant thing that Lincoln and Darwin have in common is they “each touched off a revolution that changed the world,” according to Newsweek’s Malcolm Jones. Or, to put it in another historical perspective, they both appear on World Almanac’s Ten Most Influential People of the Second Millennium. The list was compiled by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and second-generation historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

(See how many of the other ten you can guess – the list is at  the bottom of this article.)

The Lincoln-Darwin comparison list is perhaps not as long as a famous one tying together Lincoln and John F. Kennedy (they were both assassinated by a man with three names composed of 15 letters, etc.) but they did have their similarities. Both lost their mothers in childhood, had strained relationships with their fathers, had difficulty settling on a career, suffered from depression and lost children to early death. Neither gave much evidence of future greatness until well into middle age, as Darwin published "The Origin of Species" when he was 50, and Lincoln won the presidency a year later.

Monmouth College faculty members were recently asked to compile their own “millennium list” of historical figures, and 10 names showed up on multiple ballots, including Lincoln and Darwin. The others included Albert Einstein, who was the leading vote-getter, followed by Martin Luther, Johann Gutenberg, Mahatma Gandhi, William Shakespeare, Martin Luther King, Jr., Galileo Galilei and birth control activist Margaret Sanger.

Answer from above: In order, William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Darwin, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Albert Einstein, Christopher Columbus, Lincoln, Johann Gutenberg and William Harvey. Interestingly, Schlesinger’s list included eight of the top 10 from a list compiled by the A&E network in 1999. The exceptions were Lincoln and Harvey, a 17th-century doctor who was the first to correctly describe systemic circulation. A&E’s list replaced those men with Martin Luther and Karl Marx.