Excerpt

The prevailing understanding of natural selection originates on July 1, 1858, when Charles Lyell presented the work of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace on natural selection to the Linnean Society of London. Shortly thereafter, on August 20, their presentation was published as a joint paper to the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society as “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Selection” (Darwin and Wallace 1858).

The idea of natural selection was sufficiently novel to Victorian science  that  Darwin  and  Wallace  felt  it  necessary  to  introduce  a mechanical metaphor to elucidate its action: “The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure soon to follow.”

Bibliography

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