Search

Copyright of Universitas Médica is the property of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Far from having diminished Darwin's priority in the formulation of natural selection theory, Alfred Russel Wallace's "On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type" supposes a way of reasoning that, besides being incompatible with that theory, does not carry us to Darwin's principle of divergence. The fundamental limitation of Wallace's argument was to consider that the formation of varieties did not deserve further explanations. His theory was just an explanation for the substitution of an original form by a derived variety, not an explanation of the proliferation of lineages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]