According to
this talk origins article the concept of natural selection was well established before Darwin. The accepted view of the function of natural selection was to keep types the same.
What Darwin did which was different to his predecessors was to stand this view on its head and realise that natural selection was the primary cause of evolutionary change.
From the link:
Darwin's theory therefore cannot be equated with the simple claim that natural selection operates. Nearly all his colleagues and predecessors accepted this postulate. Darwin, in his characteristic and radical way, grasped that this standard mechanism for preserving the type could be inverted, and then converted into the primary cause of evolutionary change. Natural selection obviously lies at the center of Darwin's theory, but we must recognize, as Darwin's second key postulate, the claim that natural selection acts as the creative force of evolutionary change. The essence of Darwinism cannot reside in the mere observation that natural selection operates - for everyone had long accepted a negative role for natural selection in eliminating the unfit and preserving the type
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