for which there is no evidence that Matthew's ideas are present in Darwin's work, the records of his development of ideas, and expression of those concepts in his writing can be shown to extend from the time he was leaving for the Beagle voyage, up until the coalescence of his ideas into his cohesive system of evolution by natural selection in 1858. Niles Eldredge, points out the very valid point that seeing Matthew's descriptions at any point during that extended period, would likely have resulted in an integral, preformed model being described by Darwin from the outset, whereas what we actually have in his notes is realisation of the full picture from development of incremental sketches, Analysis of comparative speciation concepts Sutton's claim that Darwin and Wallace plagiarised evolution by natural selection from Matthew also has been refuted by Joachim Dagg, [Wallace's] concept of lineage-adaptation as a sequence of extinctions of less fit and survival of fitter varieties and his gradualism put him closer to Darwin than to Matthew. But he emphasized environmental changes for differential extinction and some form of isolation for lineage-splitting and speciation, whereas Darwin's mature theory saw competition as a sufficient cause of divergence, differential extinction, lineage-adaptation and lineage-splitting. This is not to say that Darwin was right in this view and Wallace wrong. By current standards, they were both right and wrong in different respects (competitive vs. environmental selection, sympatric vs. allopatric speciation). The perspective emerging from this comparison shows at least four unique theories (Matthew, early Darwin, mature Darwin and Wallace), each interesting in its own right. Each theory integrated change in conditions, variability, competition and natural selection in ways that allowed for species transformation somehow. Apart from this similarity, the theories differ significantly from each other in the mechanisms underlying transformation. However, this difference does not lie in the struggle for survival and survival of the fittest, but in the way in which natural selection is integrated with variability, competition and environmental conditions. Transmutation is a convergent result of structurally different mechanisms. The similarity of Matthew's scheme to the theory of punctuated equilibria is equally superficial. Eldredge & Gould (1972) took Mayr's model of allopatric speciation and combined it with Wright's model of genetic drift in order to explain gaps in the fossil record as results of relatively swift evolutionary change in small and isolated populations. Although catastrophes can produce such populations they