Alfred Venables, Julian Wimpenny and David Lloyd (Letters, December 3) suggest that Alfred Russel Wallace "has a stronger claim to the theory of evolution than has Darwin", and imply that there is something suspect in Charles Darwin's reaction to the 1858 letter from Wallace. This is contradicted by well-documented facts.
The development of Darwin's thoughts on evolution can be traced in his notebooks of 1836-38, published in 1987 by Cornell University Press. These show that he had arrived at the theory of evolution by natural selection in 1838, fully 20 years before Wallace. In 1844 he wrote a detailed "sketch" of his ideas, which was communicated to Joseph Hooker. He had also discussed his ideas with Charles Lyell. He had intended to write a much larger work than The Origin of Species, but was stimulated by Wallace's letter into first publishing a short paper alongside Wallace's in 1858, and then into writing the Origin.
He followed this up with many other major books, the ideas for which are also recorded in his notebooks. It is well known that others before Darwin and Wallace had proposed the idea of evolution, and of natural selection. Darwin's unique contribution was to marshal a wide range of evidence from the natural history of his time, supporting evolution as a historical process and natural selection as its main cause. Valuable as Wallace's contributions to biology were, there is no doubt that they are overshadowed by Darwin's range of insights into questions that the theory of natural selection could illuminate, and his mastery of the facts.