We might call this the Wallace problem, for Alfred Russel Wallace, who discovered natural selection independent of Charles Darwin.

NEWYORKER: A Man of Letters

Scientist Alfred Russel Wallace, who proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection with Charles Darwin, corresponded with the great and good of 19th Century society.

BBC: Search for Alfred Russel Wallace's 19th Century letters

Letters written by scientist Alfred Russel Wallace, who proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection with Charles Darwin, will be published online for the first time.

BBC: Alfred Russel Wallace's 19th Century letters go online

These included well known naturalists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, who collected specimens in the Amazon and Malay Archipelago and independently formulated a theory of evolution by natural selection.

BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Darwin's letters archived on web

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution.

NEWYORKER: In the Air

Along the way, Winchester pauses every third paragraph or so to delve into some topic that is not, at first glance, relevant to his story: Lloyd's of London, for instance, or the Reuters news agency, or Dutch colonial policy in Java, or the biological theories of Alfred Russel Wallace.

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