What if 1759 or 1959 first saw theory that a vast diversity of species needed to best fill every little niche in Nature ?

Muscular Modernity was going to happen, was already well underway, whether or not Darwin and Wallace ever publicly presented their new theory that Natural Selection, aka Survival of the Fittest, was why Evolution did exist and how it worked itself out.

I believe that if that theory had been presented a century earlier or a century later, the theory would have stood a better chance to being - correctly - seen as the theory that accounts for the wide diversity in kinds of 'fittest' living beings, each accurately reflecting the extremely wide diversity of niches in Nature.

Not as a theory that confirmed muscular modernity's belief that the world was progressively moving to the day when one small sub-section of one recent species (humanity) won a competition etched in toothmarks and blood ---- and ended up controlling and consuming almost all of Nature's bounty...