Darwin and Wallace

On June 18, 1858, Charles Darwin received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist working in the Malay Archipelago, containing an essay outlining a theory of natural selection so closely parallel to Darwin's own unpublished work that Darwin described it as though Wallace had read his manuscript. Darwin had been developing the theory for twenty years. Wallace had arrived at the same conclusion independently, working with different specimens, different field conditions, and a different intellectual biography. The convergence was precise enough to constitute, in the judgment of both men and their contemporaries, a single discovery made by two minds. For Kroeber, the case is the canonical instance of simultaneous invention and the strongest empirical evidence that the theory of natural selection was not inside either mind but in the cultural configuration that carried both.