Thread by @petelincoln48

1/Charles Darwin got the credit for the theory of evolution, even though the credit should go to Alfred Russel Wallace. Most don’t know this. Why has he been minimized by history. Read on.

2/During his expedition to Sarawak in the Malay archipelago, Wallace published a paper, in 1855, entitled On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species. It set out the entire theory of evolution, except for how the species change.

3/Wallace’s “Sarawak law”, as it came to be called, basically said that “every species had come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing closely allied species” Modern theory of evolution teaches in that man has evolved from some ancestral ape.

4/In 1958 the idea of the survival of the fittest occurred to Wallace. Wallace then wrote out his Ternate paper. This was the document that contained the key to the theory of evolution: survival of the fittest was the mechanism.

5/Darwin received a copy from Wallace in June 1858; twelve months later Darwin published the book for which he is best known, On the Origin of Species.

6/In the early 1880s, Wallace was drawn into the debate over mandatory smallpox vaccination. When Wallace did some research, he discovered instances where supporters of vaccination had used questionable, in a few cases completely phony, statistics to support their arguments.

7/Wallace suspected that physicians had a vested interest in promoting vaccination, and became convinced that reductions in the incidence of smallpox that had been attributed to vaccination were, in fact, due to better hygiene and improvements in public sanitation.

8/Wallace believed that, due to natural selection, organisms were in a state of balance with their environment, and that everything in nature, even disease-causing organisms, served a useful purpose . He feared vaccination might upset that natural balance with unfortunate results

9/Wallace and other anti-vaccinationists pointed out that vaccination, which at the time was often done in a sloppy and unsanitary manner, could be dangerous.

10/In 1898, Wallace wrote a pamphlet, Vaccination a Delusion; Its Penal Enforcement a Crime, attacking the commission's findings. It, in turn, was attacked by The Lancet.

11/ Funny how the real Father of Evolution , which is one of the most important theories of Biological Science would be called anti-science and anti-vaxxer today.