All you say may, in fact, be true. Blyth’s scenario is more one of elimination rather than selection. Blyth nonetheless commended Wallace’s views. But far more importantly, all this is somewhat beside the point. The point is, even given the acknowledged co-discoveries of natural selection via Darwin/Wallace (Blyth notwithsanding), Wallace proves beyond doubt that Darwin’s theory was too overarching in its materialism and too confident in its naturalist explanations for all of creation to be the comprehensive model he claimed it to be. In short, Wallace demonstrates that evolution can be designed with natural selection subordinate to its designer. This is NOT the deistic secondary causes Darwin wanted to invoke either, because Wallace saw the process as proactive and proceeding not only with design but with intent. Of course this isn’t Darwinism anymore; it’s Wallaceism. Arguments about who “discovered” it first and third party contributions, revisions, objections, nuances, etc. (whatever their merit) really tend to fall into the enemies hands because it permits the continued marginalization of Wallace, and FOR SURE the last thing they want to have to deal with is a resurrected Wallaceism. It shows their NOMA to be a sham and allows for the open debate of design as a legitimate scientific project, something Wallace had always argued for. Incorporating Wallace into the legitimate historical heritage of ID stands Darwin on his head and points up the fact that natural selection can as easily lead to design as to materialism – Darwinism is not the only road. We can argue details later . . .

Edward Blyth wrote a series of articles in the 1830s discussing natural selection, but Blyth did not see natural selection in terms of evolving species but rather as restoring animals to their archetypes.-Flannery

Exactly. And what does observation tell us:

Sexuality has brought joy to the world, to the world of the wild beasts, and to the world of flowers, but it has brought an end to evolution. In the lineages of living beings, whenever absent-minded Venus has taken the upper hand, forms have forgotten to make progress. It is only the husbandman that has improved strains, and he has done so by bullying, enslaving, and segregating. All these methods, of course, have made for sad, alienated animals, but they have not resulted in new species. Left to themselves, domesticated breeds would either die out or revert to the wild state—scarcely a commendable model for nature’s progress.

(snip a few paragraphs on peppered moths)

Natural Selection, which indeed occurs in nature (as Bishop Wilberforce, too, was perfectly aware), mainly has the effect of maintaining equilibrium and stability. It eliminates all those that dare depart from the type—the eccentrics and the adventurers and the marginal sort. It is ever adjusting populations, but it does so in each case by bringing them back to the norm. We read in the textbooks that, when environmental conditions change, the selection process may produce a shift in a population’s mean values, by a process known as adaptation. If the climate turns very cold, the cold-adapted beings are favored relative to others.; if it becomes windy, the wind blows away those that are most exposed; if an illness breaks out, those in questionable health will be lost. But all these artful guiles serve their purpose only until the clouds blow away. The species, in fact, is an organic entity, a typical form, which may deviate only to return to the furrow of its destiny; it may wander from the band only to find its proper place by returning to the gang.

Everything that disassembles, upsets proportions or becomes distorted in any way is sooner or later brought back to the type. There has been a tendency to confuse fleeting adjustments with grand destinies, minor shrewdness with signs of the times.

It is true that species may lose something on the way—the mole its eyes, say, and the succulent plant its leaves, never to recover them again. But here we are dealing with unhappy, mutilated species, at the margins of their area of distribution—the extreme and the specialized. These are species with no future; they are not pioneers, but prisoners in nature’s penitentiary.—geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti in “Why is a Fly Not a Horse?”

So I really wouldn’t say Blyth in any sense “discovered” natural selection in the modern sense of its useage.–Flannery

He described it for what it is. “It is what it is.”

A dispute over whether to add the Darwin-Lincoln birthdate coincidence to Darwin’s biography was one of the biggest edit wars in Wikipedia history:

Is sharing a birthday with Abraham Lincoln important enough to include in the Charles Darwin article, or is it a bit of trivia that has no place in an encyclopedia? As of 4 February 2005, there has been an eight week-long revert war over a single sentence. . . . . . The discussions at Talk:Charles Darwin/Lincoln and LincolnArchive01, plus the arbitration pages amount to some 30,000 words, which is about the length of a short Agatha Christie novel. — from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.....les_Darwin

It was finally overwhelmingly decided to omit the coincidence. One advocate of including the coincidence reverted the Darwin biography 37 times — see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T....._Debate.3F

The solution under my proposed Wikipedia dispute resolution procedure would be to add the birthdate coincidence along with (1) a note that there is a dispute over whether including the coincidence is appropriate and (2) links to Wikipedian an external-website discussions and debates on the dispute.

Despite the triviality of the coincidence, the Darwin Day celebrations include a Darwin-Lincoln essay contest.

Ironically, we are not even sure of Lincoln’s actual birthdate — he was born on the frontier, where people tend to lose track of dates.

The gene pool of any population is limited and natural selection can only reshuffle the deck it has been given. Darwin assumed the deck had infinite variation so that all the species of the world were somewhere in the deck and only needed additional shuffles to reach each of these species. That was Darwin’s major mistake.

So both Darwin and Blyth were correct but in reality Blyth’s understanding is closer to reality because the deck is limited.

Natural selection gives us the richness of the life we see around us but it can only work with the cards it has been dealt.

Edward Blyth wrote a series of articles in the 1830s discussing natural selection, but Blyth did not see natural selection in terms of evolving species but rather as restoring animals to their archetypes. In fact, Blyth was one of the first to appreciate the significance of Wallace’s seminal work in this area. So I really wouldn’t say Blyth in any sense “discovered” natural selection in the modern sense of its useage. He was a precursor much as Chambers had been with his Vestiges.

Probably Wallace’s objections to strictly naturalistic explanations of the origin of life and the human mind were not based on emotional problems he had with such explanations, but on the logical problems. Interesting how the motives of anyone who tries to re-insert design into any part of the story are called into question, even if that person is the co-author of the theory of evolution.