Wallace figured out natural selection while burning with malaria in Indonesia. Same theory as Darwin. Same year. He wrote it down in three feverish days and mailed it to Darwin — who'd been sitting on the idea for twenty years. Darwin panicked. His friends arranged a joint presentation to save his priority, but history remembers it as Darwin's theory. Wallace never seemed bitter about it. He spent the rest of his life exploring, collecting over 125,000 specimens, and championing causes nobody else would touch — spiritualism, socialism, women's suffrage. The man who almost got credit for evolution became the footnote who did everything else.
January 8, 1823
203 years ago
What Else Happened on January 8
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