Darwin is best example of bad framing of good science

People keep having such a linear concept of evolution even among people who should know better. It is of great problem that it was Darwin who published instead of Wallace. Species do not ever evolve from a single individual but from entire populations that become separated and have traits that emerge differently.

Species become different mostly because of physical isolation that continues, and then may cease as mountains corrode or individuals make it back across the barrier. Among Humans after 600 years or so virtually everyone is a decedent of those who lived 600 years before as possible ancestors. Some will appear more times than others but few will "Die out" completely, it is only traits that increase of not. The number of children had will have little actual effect as negative traits are what survives or not, and that takes many generations.

It is only traits that "evolve" in a population, and even then a small change that exists in one group might be enhanced by the chance encounter with another trait present in another group. Eventually both traits might dominate the population but the ancestry would include those with the trait as well as those without it, with each trait "evolving" quite separately from the rest.

For example a particularly useful horn formation might first appear on an individual with a redder coat, but unless those genes were very close on the DNA the horn formation might stay and the redder coat not, they would not be connected. With a very large interbreeding population traits change very slowly, and only pandemic will change them quickly. Even then the trait that is lucky enough to hang out near the site of the anti-pandemic gene will be carried forward quite aside from its own favorableness otherwise.

Wallace's paper framed the facts in that much more correct manner, while Darwin opened the door to some of the most divisive and wrong headed politics to have plagued mankind for the last hundred years. Social Darwinism, Eugenics, and many of their derivatives like Nazis, Libertarianism, and some of the more odd variants of Soviet Communism as well as some of the reactions against Darwin from Creationism to the old Tabula Rasa ideas that have befuddled and muddied the behaviorial sciences for generations.