Two men independently discovered evolution, and shared the announcement

Alfred Russel Wallace, working in Indonesia, mailed Charles Darwin an essay describing natural selection — the same theory Darwin had quietly developed over twenty years. Rather than compete, their friends arranged for both men's work to be read jointly to the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858, a year before Darwin published On the Origin of Species.

— Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties — Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, 1858