A nice little recap of the history of it all from Wired:

Darwin was still working on his magnum opus when in June 1858 he received a letter from an English naturalist working in Malaysia. Alfred Russel Wallace was young and brash. When he conceived of natural selection, he didn’t plan a 10-volume lifework. He just dashed off a quick paper on the subject and mailed it to the author of The Voyage of the Beagle, asking him to refer it for publication if it seemed good enough.

Darwin was crestfallen. Was he about to lose credit for two decades of work? Wallace had suggested that Darwin forward the paper to Scottish geologist Charles Lyell. Along with English botanist Joseph Hooker, Lyell was one of a small handful of people Darwin had shown early drafts of his own work on natural selection.

Darwin wrote to Lyell and Hooker, and they arranged for a joint paper to be read at the forthcoming meeting of the Linnaean Society of London. (Founded in 1788 and named for Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish scientist who devised the binomial system of taxonomy, it is the world’s oldest active biological society.)

Neither Darwin nor Wallace attended the meeting. Wallace was still in Malaysia. Darwin was at home with his wife mourning the death of their 19-month-old son just three days earlier.

The secretary of the society read the 18-page paper, comprising four parts:

  1. The readers’ own letter of introduction explaining the extraordinary circumstances;
  2. An excerpt from Darwin’s unpublished draft, part of a chapter titled, “On the Variation of Organic Beings in a State of Nature; on the Natural Means of Selection; on the Comparison of Domestic Races and True Species”;
  3. An abstract of Darwin’s 1857 letter on the subject to Harvard University botanist Asa Gray;
  4. Wallace’s manuscript, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type.”

The paper and the meeting did not cause an immediate sensation. Other papers were read the same day. The society had routine business to transact. The meeting was long (.pdf). But the paper was accepted for publication in the society’s Proceedings later that year.

Was this a remarkable case of simultaneous discovery? Not quite. It was more like simultaneous announcement. What is remarkable is that both Darwin and Wallace credited their central insight to reading Thomas Malthus’ essay, Population, first published in 1798.

Reminds me again of this great Gladwell essay.