Direct answer: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace are historically recognized as the principal figures associated with discovering and formulating the theory of evolution by natural selection in the 19th century, with Darwin ultimately providing the mechanism of natural selection and Wallace independently conceiving a similar idea. Context and nuances:
- Early ideas about evolution predate Darwin and Wallace, including observations by geologists, paleontologists, and naturalists in the 18th and early 19th centuries. These ideas established that life changes over time and that many species have gone extinct, laying groundwork for evolutionary thinking.
- Darwin and Wallace independently developed naturalistic explanations for how evolution occurs. Darwin spent decades compiling evidence and published On the Origin of Species in 1859, arguing that natural selection acting on heritable variation drives descent with modification. Wallace, after proposing a theory of natural selection similar to Darwin’s, jointly presented their ideas in 1858, and Darwin published his comprehensive work soon after.
- In public perception, Darwin is widely credited with “discovering” evolution, in part because of the extensive evidence he gathered and the influential publication of Origin of Species, which framed evolution as a testable, natural process with natural selection as the mechanism. However, Wallace’s parallel insight and his subsequent work are also central to the history of the theory. Modern histories emphasize this shared development rather than a single inventor.
- Some sources and scholars discuss other contributors and earlier thinkers who proposed evolutionary ideas, but Darwin and Wallace are the two most associated with the modern theory of evolution by natural selection.
If you’d like, I can pull concise summaries from reliable sources to illustrate the timeline and the roles of Darwin and Wallace, or explain how their ideas differed and how the scientific community eventually integrated them.
