toobfreak
Tungsten/Glass Member
Not how I recall it. Wallace wrote to Darwin, but Darwin had been formulating he theories for decades by then. The only thing Darwin got from Wallace was the push to publish.
Nah. Darwin sat on his theories for years unable to prove them and fearful of ridicule over them until Wallace came along freely telling him everything while out afoot amongst the islands of Malaysia doing the actual dirty leg work, until a friend of Darwin's reading Wallace's letters told Darwin that Wallace could publish at any time beating him to the punchline taking all the credit and that spurred Darwin to go forth and finaslly publish his theories. Of course, he made no mention of Wallace.
At some point later, for about ten years, Wallace got almost equal recognition for the theories from the general community, but as time went on, Wallace slowly got rubbed out of collective memory because Darwin was a silver spooned elite university trained scholar from a rich family and Wallace was basically just some highly motivated boob amateur with as butterfly net.