Unlike more technically intricate scientific breakthroughs, it seems somehow appropriate that the basic evolutionary algorithm should just pop into the mind in a moment of recognition. (Darwin’s great supporter, T. H. Huxley, is said to have exclaimed, on hearing the natural selection argument for the first time, “How incredibly stupid not to think of that.”) Darwin’s account also possesses a strangely poetic symmetry, because years later, when Alfred Russel Wallace independently hit upon the theory of natural selection, he claimed his breakthrough had been inspired by Malthus as well.
