It was 150 years ago today that papers of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace’s explaining the theory of natural selection - now recognized as the main driver of evolution - were presented to the Linnean Society of London.

This post at The Beagle Project Blog gives an excellent and interesting account of the momentous occasion. Here are they key moments in the story:

Wallace spent much of the late 1840’s and early 1850’s on expeditions in tropical locales, hunting for the mechanism behind the evolutionary change in species. Wallace wrote a paper on the subject in 1855, prompting the eminent geologist Charles Lyell to pay a visit to Darwin, who then spilled the beans on his theory of natural selection that he’d spent the last 20 years mulling over.

Lyell urged Darwin to publish his theory, lest someone else beat him to it. As it happened, in February 1858, Wallace thought of natural selection while stricken by a fever in Indonesia. Wallace even sent an essay to Darwin, who he knew to be interested in the subject, explaining his theory.

Darwin appealed to Lyell and another friend, Jospeh Hooker, who decided to present papers from both Wallace and Darwin to the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858. They were published in the Society’s journal a month later. Fifteen months later Darwin’s semincal “On the Origin of Species” was published.

And such were the beginnings of the most fundamental theory in biology.