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The Tale of Alfred Wallace: Charles Darwin’s Equal.

The co-discoverer of natural selection that history forgot.

Niall Leah
10 min readSep 9, 2022
Morphart Creation (Shutterstock with Standard usage rights.)

Despite his incredible achievements, The name Alfred Wallace is something of a forgotten name in history.

Lots of people haven’t heard of him.

All despite the fact that he played as much of a role as Darwin in establishing natural selection as the prevailing theory for the origin of species.

Back then, it was known as the Darwin-Wallace theory.

True. Wallacism isn’t as catchy as Darwinism, but he deserves half of the credit, and once upon a time, he had it.

In his own time, he was considered the co-discover of the theory of natural selection.

An unlikely naturalist.

Alfred Wallace was born in 1823 in Usk, Monmouth shire in Wales, Britain. He was born into a middle-class family that declined into the working class when he was a young boy. Despite a rough time, he would later consider the experience character-building.

During his early years, he experimented a lot and did a tremendous amount of reading. Despite not being able to finish school, he finished his own education and became fascinated with naturalism and social theory. After coming of…

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Niall Leah
Niall Leah

Written by Niall Leah

An ex-pat from the UK living in Chengdu, China. I satisfy my endless curiosity about the incredible journey of humanity by reading, traveling, and writing.

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