Darwin and Wallace

There is no obvious reason why the principles which have acted so efficiently under domestication should not have acted under Nature . More individuals are born than can possibly survive .The slightest advantage in one being, of any age or during any season, over those with which it comes into competition, or better adaptation in however slight a degree to the surrounding physical conditions, will turn the balance, the most effective nineteenth-century defender and popularizer of evolution,wrote that the publications of Darwin and Wallace were a flash of light, which to a man who has lost himself in a dark night, suddenly reveals a road which, whether it takes him straight home or not, certainly goes his way .