All of francis kafka's Comments + Replies
Bowler's comment on Wallace is that his theory was not worked out to the extent that Darwin's was, and besides I recall that he was a theistic evolutionist. Even with Wallace, there was still a plethora of non-Darwinian evolutionary theories before and after Darwin, and without the force of Darwin's version, it's not likely or necessary that Darwinism wins out.
...But Wallace’s version of the theory was not the same as Darwin’s, and he had very different ideas about its implications. And since Wallace conceived his theory in 1858, any equivalent to Darwi
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1Have you read Michel Serres's The Birth of Physics? He suggests that the Epicureans and Lucretius in particular have worked out a serious theory of physics that's closer to thermodynamics and fluid mechanics than Newtonian physics
Peter J. Bowler suggests that evolution by natural selection is this in his book "Darwin Deleted" - given that in real life, there was an "eclipse of Darwinism", he suggests that without Darwin, various non-Darwinian theories of evolution would have been developed further, and evolution by natural selection would have come rather late
This is interesting because I myself spent a lot of my life being very not-Green; now Green is much more intuitive for me
I mean to some extent, Dawkins isn't a historian of science, presentism, yadda yadda but from what I've seen he's right here. Not that Wallace is somehow worse, given that of all the people out there he was certainly closer than the rest. That's about it