Dayton would be a great place to put up a statue of Charles Darwin. Likely we could raise funding for that worldwide.

Maybe a visit to Dayton, Tennessee is in order, as well as the Smoky Mountains, eh?

My point was about ultimate results. Both Freud and Marx were world class theoreticians and intellectual pioneers, no argument about that.

Marx failed to foresee that his theories, implemented by sociopathic political opportunists such as Lenin and Stain, would cause millions of innocent deaths and untold suffering for hundreds of millions more. As brilliant as he was, his failure to consider, or perhaps even recognize, that potential consequence disqualifies him from any list of the truly great.

And as for Freud: inventor of the field of psychology he may have been, but his own myopia in confusing zeitgeist mores with mental health also spelled suffering for many people.

Because of the ultimate results from their work, both Marx and Freud fail what I would call a rational standard of greatness, despite the groundbreaking nature of their seminal work.

Your knowledge is limited by your reading list as much as the British reporter is limited by his. (Forget the Bush-Rove reading list being passed around in the news now).

I’m no expert on all of it either, but the point is, Freud and Marx influenced academic thought about as much as Darwin or Newton or even Einstein, though the latter three practiced in the hard sciences, while Marx and Feud were social scientists. If you were to spend some time in a communications, sociology or psychology department at a research university, for example, you would encounter Marx and Feud more than Darwin.

There is one field that literally draws from the modern descendants of Darwin and Freud, and that field is called evolutionary psychology. There was no study of psychology to speak of before Freud. Now there is an entire field of study that draws from them both.

No one in Alabama knows anything about any of this, because none of the colleges or universities in Alabama have an evolutionary psychology program. Sociology is almost non-existent other than the basic intro survey courses here.

This is quite odd, considering that one of the top scientists in the world who knows more about Darwin than anyone alive just happens to be from Alabama. His name is E.O. Wilson, and we’ve featured enough about him on this Website over the past four years to give people a basic introduction to his work. We will be talking about it more in the year ahead.

As for Marx, while you are more knowledgeable than the average Auburn engineer blogger on the subject, you are mistaking his political pronouncements with his social, theoretical work. As I indicated, it is this work that has influenced academic researchers in all kinds of disciplines and why he is always on the list of the most influential thinkers.

The knee-jerk reaction to his name in American capitalist politics and journalism is as offensive to intellectuals as the reaction from the Christian Right to Darwin’s early work on the theory of natural selection.

How long can ignorance be bliss? Until all the ice melts and were are all under water?

The point is the early thought from Marx, Freud and Darwin were as important as the early work by Newton and Einstein. We wouldn’t know what we know today without them.

For our purposes today, E.O. Wilson’s work is far more important, as is the Human Genome Project in a way, for that matter. But none of that would have occurred without Darwin.

While Marx was on the money with much, but not all, of his analysis of capitalism, he was way off the mark with socialism as the ideal replacement. He did not foresee what would happen to his ideology in the hands of people like Lenin, Stalin and Mao. He did not understand that any mostly-or-totally collectivized economy would always require an authoritarian or totalitarian state to maintain.

And Marx missed the fatal flaw that socialism features, namely the inability to determine the true prices of goods and services. Mises and Hayek, decades later, expertly documented that flaw.

The Austrian economists also showed why, at the roots, socialism, communism and fascism are variants of the same ideology. William Shirer, in “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” illustrates that with a report about how, returning from Moscow after the agreement was made between Stalin and Hilter to divvy up Poland, top Nazis commented how much “at home” they felt hanging out with top Communists in the Kremlin. Indeed.

While Freud’s techniques of psychological evaluation have been shown to be valid, many of his conclusions have since been demonstrated to be simplistic, based rather largely in the Victorian mores prevalent in late 19th century and early 20th century Europe and America. Conditions he considered “illnesses” are today considered socially acceptable lifestyles.

Of the three, only Darwin remains relatively unshaken. Considering the state of scientific technology in 19th century, Darwin’s observations and conclusions are nothing short of genius. If anything, all subsequent scientific investigation has demonstrated Darwin was right on the money, even even though he lacked the extensive knowledge we have today of geologic history, fossils and DNA. Mistakes he made because of that can be easily forgiven.

Were someone to ask me to nominate the three greatest intellectuals of the last 150 years, Darwin would be one of them, but neither Marx or Freud would make my list. Darwin hit on the truth. Marx and Freud, although searching, did not, and can arguably be faulted with helping create much human misery during the ensuing 15 decades.