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WAS John Lennon more important than Shakespeare? Was Churchill greater than Nelson? Readers in Sydney or San Francisco may be blissfully unaware of the fact, but in recent weeks people in Britain have been sucked into a national debate over such questions. The BBC has been urging people to vote for the greatest Briton of all time.

There are 10 candidates – Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell, Princess Diana, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Newton and Darwin, as well as the aforementioned four. Each is sponsored by a television personality. And the story so far is not so much of a rigorous debate as a game of top trumps for grown-ups, replete with allegations of vote rigging, underhand tactics and bias against Scottish candidates (there aren’t any). The sensible course would be to stay aloof from such a sordid fray but, hey, where’s the fun in that…

Lennon and Shakespeare enriched the world. Did either fundamentally transform human thought, though? Elizabeth I’s greatness was ultimately an accident of birth. Cromwell did unspeakable things to the Irish. Diana died too recently to assess her place in history. Churchill and Nelson were, in their own different ways, great war leaders – but there have been others down the centuries.

That, curiously enough, leaves a short list of one engineer and two scientists. Through his mighty bridges and tunnels, Brunel certainly transformed the fabric of a nation. But where’s the intellectual legacy of this cigar chomper? There is no Brunelian world view as there is Newtonian physics or Darwinism. Another one bites the dust.

So it comes down to Charles versus Sir Isaac. Newton’s ideas about force, mass and gravity changed forever our perceptions about material objects. But isn’t it just a bit more spine-tingling to transform people’s views of their origins? Others would have run with natural selection if Darwin hadn’t, it’s true, but the meticulous, unswerving way in which he launched his big idea, reluctantly at first, was essential to its impact.

This Briton may not play well everywhere. Middle America still has a few problems with him. We do not even claim he is the greatest scientist of all time: a contest with Einstein would be a close call. But as we went to press Darwin was stuck in fourth place. We think he deserves better. If you agree you can vote from anywhere in the world at .