Maybe it should be renamed the "Matthew Award"?

[catsmate]

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon.

And Charles's grandfather, Doctor Erasmus Darwin.

 

[Puppycow]

That would happen when
- all the technologies had been invented
- no great genius required for the invention/discovery
- society is ready for it.

This has happened many times over history. Like who invented the light bulb?

Yeah, someone else would have thought of it even if Darwin had never been born.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace OM FRS (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator.[1] He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection; his paper on the subject was jointly published with some of Charles Darwin's writings in 1858.[2] This prompted Darwin to publish On the Origin of Species.

Like Darwin, Wallace did extensive fieldwork—first in the Amazon River basin, and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide now termed the Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western portion in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna reflect Australasia. He was considered the 19th century's leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species and is sometimes called the "father of biogeography".[3]

Wallace was one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century and made many other contributions to the development of evolutionary theory besides being co-discoverer of natural selection.

Same thing with Newton and Leibnitz, right?

Einstein might be an exception, but probably eventually someone would have hit upon those same ideas, right? Maybe a few decades later, but eventually.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

And Charles's grandfather, Doctor Erasmus Darwin.

Note that I'm referring to people that Darwin explicitly credited since we're talking about whether Darwin stole the theory. Did Charles specifically mention his grandfather?

I'm also not sure that Erasmus' idea of natural selection was actually recognized in it's time. His more general idea of universal common descent was.

 

[Wolrab]

How did Patrick Matthew die?

Lack of oxygen to the brain like everyone else ever.