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In all the hoopla to be expected in the next year over Darwin, it may become a cottage industry to spot and correct the errors in popular accounts of his life and work (not to mention the deliberate distortions of creationists). Just to warm up a bit, here is an account in The Independent by Archie Bland entitled "The Big Question: How important was Charles Darwin, and what is his legacy today?":

Except that competition between species wasn't Darwin's key idea. As Peter Bowler points out in his excellent Evolution: The History of an Idea, Darwin focused on competition between individuals within a population, not on competition between species. Alfred Russel Wallace came much closer to the latter idea, possibly envisioning competition between subspecies as the driving force behind evolution, though there is no absolute statement to that effect in his original paper. Darwin did allow for such competition as a source of divergence and, eventually, speciation, but to him the source of evolutionary change was competition between individual organisms.

On the other hand, Mr. Bland avoids a common mistake by crediting Darwin's recognition of the variation in mockingbirds on different islands in the Galapagos as Darwin's crucial early insight, not, as many suppose, the variation in "Darwin's finches," a legend that Darwin himself contributed to in recounting his visit to the islands.

It's going to be an interesting year.
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