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The Word
“Evolution” was an English word for two and a half centuries before it named a theory of species. The senses are dated, and the historians who have traced them disagree about whether the later grew out of the earlier or broke from it.
Unrolling
Latin evolvere is to unroll, and an evolutio was the unrolling of a scroll. The English word is attested in the 1610s, first for a military manoeuvre, then for opening out or revealing, and from the 1660s for an individual’s growth to maturity. A 1670 notice in the Philosophical Transactions of Swammerdam’s work on insects already speaks of their “gradual and natural Evolution and Growth”.
The preformed germ
In 1744 Albrecht von Haller brought the word into biological writing for the theory of generation he favoured: the germ is a miniature of the adult, and development is its unfolding. Charles Bonnet, from 1762, made “evolution” and “development” synonyms for the expansion of that preformed germ, and extended the picture to a succession of species developing from preformed germs over time. When Wolff’s epigenesis (1759) displaced preformation, the word stayed attached to embryonic development in an altered sense, used, as T. H. Huxley later put it, by writers who would emphatically deny that evolution in Bonnet’s sense ever occurs. Huxley’s “Evolution in Biology” for the ninth Britannica (1878) was the first history of the word and already gave it two senses, the preformationist and the modern; his own definition of embryonic evolution there, from relative homogeneity to heterogeneity, is Spencer’s phrasing applied to von Baer’s embryo.
The first use for species
The first English application of the word to the transformation of species is hostile. Charles Lyell, in the second volume of the Principles of Geology (1832), summarised Lamarck’s view that “the testacea of the ocean existed first, until some of them, by gradual evolution, were improved into those inhabiting the land”, and rejected it: there was no evidence “in favour of the fancied evolution of one species out of another”. It is the volume’s only use in that sense; the same volume has the “evolution of carbonic acid” and “these evolutions” of the embryonic brain, so in 1832 the word sat astride chemistry, embryology and transmutation at once. In French the idea was “transformisme”; in English it went under another name, and Chambers’s Vestiges (1844) calls it the “development hypothesis” without using “evolution” at all.
Spencer’s fusion
Herbert Spencer is the word’s sponsor. His anonymous essay “The Development Hypothesis” (1852) argued, seven years before the Origin, for “the Theory of Lamarck” (retitled “the Theory of Evolution” in his later reprints). The essay runs the embryological and species senses together in one argument: every individual is evolved from a single cell, and a cell may, over millions of years, give origin to the human race. The 1857 essay “Progress: Its Law and Cause” made evolution the name of a universal law, from nebula to society, and identified it with progress; that identification is the subject of progress and direction. In First Principles (1862) evolution is “a change from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity, to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations”.
Darwin and the noun
Darwin avoided the word for twelve years. In the Origin of 1859 “evolution” does not occur; the only form is the book’s last word, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” The noun first appears in the Descent of Man (1871), on the second page of the first volume, where many of “the older and honoured chiefs in natural science” are “still opposed to evolution in every form”. The sixth edition of the Origin (1872) uses it: “almost all naturalists admit evolution under some form”; “the theory of evolution through natural selection”. By the 1860s the word was in general use for species change. Why he held off is not stated in his own words; the historians’ explanation is where the next page begins.
Linked or broken
Two readings of this history stand against each other. Peter Bowler, in “The Changing Meaning of ‘Evolution’” (1975), holds that the word originally meant the literal unfolding of pre-existing parts and that by the late nineteenth century it had shed that meaning: the species sense broke from the embryological one. Robert J. Richards, in The Meaning of Evolution (1992), holds that the two were never separate in the nineteenth-century mind: preformation became the doctrine of recapitulation, the embryo passing through its ancestors’ forms, and recapitulation gave Darwin’s generation a graphic model of how species change, so that the embryological meaning was carried into the theory rather than dropped by it.
The technical definition
What the word came to mean inside biology was fixed later, and biologists dispute the fixing: the population-genetic definition, change in the frequency of alleles from one generation to the next, is the modern synthesis’s, and Mayr called the formula “misleading”. That argument belongs to the biology page of this subject.
The word abroad
Where the word was translated, the receiving languages chose words with a direction in them. Yan Fu rendered Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics as Tianyan lun (1898), coining 天演 from “heaven” and “develop, unfold”; within a decade Chinese writers were weighing it against the Japanese 進化, and the Japanese word won. 進化 shinka, “advance” and “change”, is first attested in 1878 and was fixed by 1881; in 1902 Ōhara Shōichi warned that shinka and shinpo, progress, are not synonyms, since things both progress and degenerate. Ottoman writers of the 1890s settled on tekâmül, “perfecting”. Arabic used taraqqī and irtiqāʾ, “ascent”, and nushūʾ, “growth”, before the modern taṭawwur, from ṭawr, “stage”. Hindi uses vikās, “development, growth”.
See also: Evolution (the subject landing) · Progress and direction · The criterion · Darwinism · Spencer · Huxley · Lyell · Darwin