Mondo Knows Facts
Darwin and Wallace found natural selection
Both arrived at the same mechanism, and their joint paper appeared in 1858 Charles Darwin had worked on the idea for two decades when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him a similar essay from Southeast Asia. Their findings were read together at a London society meeting the same year. Darwin's book On the Origin of Species followed in 1859 and changed the argument. It sits in Mondo's science collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Antibiotic resistance is evolution in actionSurviving bacteria pass on genes that let them withstand the drugChloroplasts and mitochondria originated as engulfed bacteriaEndosymbiotic events turned ancient single-celled microbes into vital plant and animal organellesCell theory began with a piece of corkRobert Hooke saw tiny empty compartments in cork and called them cellsPasteur's flask ended spontaneous generationBoiled broth in a swan neck flask stayed sterile when air could enterMutations supply new genetic variationCopying errors and damage create the alleles that selection can act onPopulation bottlenecks cut genetic diversityA sharp fall in numbers leaves survivors with a narrow gene pool
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Tags: biology, evolution, history
Darwin and Wallace found natural selection: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Both arrived at the same mechanism, and their joint paper appeared in 1858. The figure is taken from Royal Society, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a science fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Science shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.