It was on this day in 1858 that the two people who first articulated the theory of evolution through natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin delivered papers at the Linnean Society. In short here’s where it begins. There are those who like to ruminate on whether Wallace was cheated out of his place in history as the “real” discoverer. The bottom line reality is the idea was in the air. I suggest because in large strokes (we wouldn’t know about genes for a long time, and lots of details are still being worked on) natural selection is the key observation, is to put it baldly, true and people who were paying close attention would eventually have to notice. And it was the early-mid nineteenth century when people did.
While this revelation about how things in the biological sphere work would not burst into the popular imagination until Darwin’s stunning Origin of Species, and why, I would argue, Darwin deserves his place or primacy in the pantheon of biological science, it was on this day in 1858, the truth about natural selection was first said out loud in a reflective way…
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