*Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913) is considered to be the man who developed the theory which *Darwin published. *Wallace was deeply involved in spiritism at the time he formulated the theory in his Ternate Paper, which *Darwin, with the help of two friends (*Charles Lyell and *Joseph Hooker), pirated and published under his own name. *Darwin, a wealthy man, thus obtained the royalties which belonged to Wallace, a poverty-ridden theorist. In 1980, *Arnold C. Brackman, in his book, A Delicate Arrangement, established that Darwin plagiarized Wallace’s material. It was arranged that a paper by Darwin would be read to the Royal Society, in London, while Wallace’s was held back until later. Priorities for the ideas thus having been taken care of, Darwin set to work to prepare his book.

In 1875, Wallace came out openly for spiritism and Marxism, another stepchild of Darwinism. This was Wallace’s theory: Species have changed in the past, by which one species descended from another in a manner that we cannot prove today. That is exactly what modern evolution teaches. Yet it has no more evidence supporting the theory than Wallace had in 1858, when he devised the theory while in a fever.

In February 1858, while in a delirious fever on the island of Ternate in the Molaccas, Wallace conceived the idea, “survival of the fittest,” as being the method by which species change. But the concept proves nothing. The fittest; which one is that? It is the one that survived longest. Which one survives longest? The fittest. This is reasoning in a circle. The phrase says nothing about the evolutionary process, much less proving it.

In the first edition of his book, Darwin regarded “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” as different concepts. By the sixth edition of his Origin of the Species, he thought they meant the same thing, but that “survival of the fittest” was the more accurate. In a still later book (Descent of Man, 1871), Darwin ultimately abandoned “natural selection” as a hopeless mechanism and returned to Lamarckism. Even Darwin recognized the theory was falling to pieces. The supporting evidence just was not there.

Source: Evolution Handbook