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Evolution

The word “evolution” is used of stars, minerals, chemistry, species, languages, cultures, economies, technologies, sciences and civilisations, of the state of a physical system under a law of motion, and of the world as a whole. Each of those homes uses the word by name and means something by it. This subject gathers what each means, and where the meanings meet.

Readers who arrive expecting biology will find what biologists mean by the word, and their argument over its definition, on Evolution in biology, and the theory of evolution by natural selection under Darwinism: the mechanism, common descent, the synthesis with genetics, and the extensions and disputes that bear its name.

The word had senses before biology took it up. Latin evolutio was the unrolling of a scroll; eighteenth-century embryology used “evolution” for the unfolding of a preformed germ; Lyell used it in 1832, disapprovingly, for Lamarck’s transmutation of species; Spencer made it the name of a universal law in the 1850s; Darwin avoided the noun until 1871. T. H. Huxley’s article for the ninth Britannica (1878) was the first history of the word and already gave it two senses. Biology’s technical definition came afterwards, and biologists dispute its breadth among themselves: Ernst Mayr called the population-genetic formula, change in the frequency of alleles, “misleading”, and Douglas Futuyma’s definition runs from slight shifts in gene frequency to the whole passage from the first organisms to dinosaurs, bees, oaks and humans.

Across most of its homes the word carries two senses. In the first, unfolding, a single thing or system changes, with no population, no heredity and no selection. Two readings by the shape of the history: morphology, Goethe’s word, in which a type runs one course per instance and the course is read off many specimens at different stages, as Herschel read the lifecycle of stars off a sky full of them and Spengler read the lifecycle of cultures off eight; and the arrow, one irreversible history with a direction, aimed or aimless, as in Spencer’s law, the stage schemes of anthropology, and cosmic evolution. Physics’ “time evolution” cuts across both: it names any change given by a rule from a state, reversible or not, and physics disputes with itself which shape its evolution has at root. The contrary of all of this is recurrence, the whole coming back, in Hutton’s world-machine or Vico’s ricorso; none of its authors used the word, and it is what the unfolding readings are defined against.

In the second sense, descent with modification, a population changes across generations. This is the Darwinian sense, and the fields that use it grade their own cases by how much of the Darwinian apparatus they carry, from biology’s paradigm case to the marginal cases the social sciences argue over. The criterion is biology’s instrument for that grading, and the page says what it does not measure.

Homes migrate between the senses, and the pages show the migrations as history: linguistics began with the lifecycle of languages and crossed to descent; chemistry hands over to selection at autocatalysis, where Calvin found selection inside chemistry and Eigen derived it from the kinetics of replicating molecules, and where the far-from-equilibrium physics of Prigogine’s school met it; mineral and cosmic evolution have pulled selection back across by widening it, while Smolin’s cosmological natural selection carries the whole Darwinian mechanism into cosmology without widening anything; and the stage schemes of anthropology reached toward descent through adaptation before the population models of cultural evolution took it up. In the descent sense itself, the fields that use the word place their own cases, and several, from economics to technology, call their inheritance Lamarckian. In metaphysics the sort itself is contested: Peirce distinguished three modes of evolution, and Bergson rejected both mechanism and finalism (see Evolution in metaphysics).

The pages

The word — the history of the word: the unrolling of a scroll, the preformed germ, Lyell’s hostile first use for species, Spencer’s fusion of embryo and species, Darwin’s avoidance of the noun, and the dispute over whether the senses were linked or broken.
Progress and direction — the arrow’s inheritance: Spencer’s law of progress, Darwin on both sides of his own text, the twentieth-century argument from Julian Huxley to Gould and Ruse, the growth metaphor, and recurrence as the pole progress is defined against.
The criterion — biology’s instrument for grading the descent sense: Lewontin’s three conditions, universal and generalised Darwinism, Godfrey-Smith’s space of paradigm and marginal Darwinian populations, and what the instrument does not measure.
Time evolution in physics — any change of a system’s state given by a rule: Hamiltonian flow, the evolution operator, von Neumann’s two processes, the irreversible evolution of open systems, and physics’ dispute over whether its evolution is reversible at root.
Stellar evolution — the life course of a star read off many stars: Herschel’s garden, Lockyer’s inorganic evolution, Russell’s giant-to-dwarf sequence, the nuclear track, and Baade’s stellar populations.
Civilisation as morphology — the life course of civilisations read across many cases: Spengler’s morphology, Toynbee’s study, Quigley’s evolution of civilisations, collapse in Tainter and Diamond, Turchin’s cycles, and Nisbet’s critique of the metaphor of growth.
Cosmic evolution — the history of the whole universe as one sequence: Shapley’s course, Jantsch, Chaisson’s definition, epochs and widened selection, big history’s thresholds, and Smolin’s cosmological natural selection.
Chemical evolution — the history of molecules before life: the soup, Calvin’s four evolutions and autocatalytic selection, Eigen’s molecular selection, and where the unfolding sense hands over to descent.
Mineral evolution: the word — the word applied to a planet’s minerals: Hazen’s comment on it and its precedent in Bowen, the objections and the general sense of change over time, and the 2023 law of functional information that re-describes it as selection; the framework itself is the mineral evolution subject.
Social evolutionism and the stage schemes — human society as a sequence of stages: Comte, Spencer, Tylor and Morgan’s ladder, Boas’s break, the return in White, Steward, Sahlins and Service, band to state, Lenski, and Childe’s revolutions.
Evolution in biology — what biologists mean by evolution as distinct from the theory: the population-genetic definition and the argument over it, Mayr’s evolution as such, and von Baer’s embryology as the other root.
Lamarck and the inheritance of acquired characters — the idea behind the word “Lamarckian”: Lamarck’s theory, Darwin’s use and disuse and pangenesis, Weismann’s barrier and the neo-Lamarckians, the Baldwin effect, Kammerer and Lysenko, epigenetics, and the word’s uses in culture, economics and technology.
Language change — the comparative method and the family tree before Darwin, the exchange with Darwin, Whitney’s institutions, sound laws and waves, Saussure’s static and evolutionary axes, and the modern field’s answers from utterance selection to the invisible hand.
Cultural evolution — the descent sense applied to culture: dual inheritance and its transmission biases, memetics and why it did not establish itself, Sperber’s cultural attraction, cultural group selection and its critics, and culture’s place on the criterion.
Economic and institutional change — Veblen’s question and Marshall’s Mecca, Schumpeter’s development from within, Alchian’s selection without maximisers, Hayek’s cultural selection of rules, Nelson and Winter’s routines, and generalised Darwinism against the continuity hypothesis.
Technology — at the scale of artefacts, Basalla’s descent, the Ziman volume, Mokyr’s limit and Arthur’s combinatorial evolution; at the scale of civilisation, Mumford’s technics, Ellul’s autonomous technique, Gille’s technical systems, Kelly’s technium and Haff’s technosphere.
Science and knowledge — the growth of knowledge as variation and selection: Popper’s natural selection of hypotheses, Campbell’s blind variation and selective retention, Toulmin’s populations of concepts, Kuhn’s closing analogy, Hull’s selection process, and the dispute over blind variation.
Evolutionary computation — evolution as a method of computing: Turing’s child machine, evolutionary programming, evolution strategies, genetic algorithms and genetic programming, a process built to have every ingredient of the recipe.
Assembly theory — construction history and selection claimed for objects without the population-genetic apparatus, from molecules to the technosphere.
Evolution in metaphysics — evolution as a principle of metaphysics: Peirce’s three modes, Bergson’s creative evolution against mechanism and finalism, the emergent evolution of Alexander and Lloyd Morgan, Whitehead’s organism, and Teilhard’s Omega Point.

Persons

Darwin · Lamarck · Lyell · Spencer · T. H. Huxley · Mayr · Dobzhansky · Lewontin · Godfrey-Smith · Julian Huxley · Gould · Prigogine · Eddington · Goethe · Spengler · Toynbee · Turchin · Chaisson · Smolin · Eigen · Kauffman · Walker · Cronin · Hazen · L. H. Morgan · Boas · L. White · Schleicher · Saussure · Boyd · Richerson · Henrich · Sperber · Veblen · Schumpeter · Hayek · Nelson · Mumford · Mokyr · Arthur · Popper · Campbell · Kuhn · Hull · Holland · Peirce · Bergson · S. Alexander · Lloyd Morgan · Whitehead