The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution by Henry Gee

selection wouldn’t be able to do very much.
    What do I mean by time “not existing”? I’m being deliberately arch here. Nowadays we are accustomed to thinking of the earth as very old—around 4,500,000,000 years old, in fact—plenty of time for natural selection to have done its work. We are inclined to take such things for granted, so it’s very hard for us to put ourselves into the minds of the average Victorian who had no reason to doubt that the earth was any more than the 5,500 years or so required by the Bible. It took quite a long time for even those interested in the subject to realize that the earth is very much older than this, and even then, only when they were confronted by an otherwise insupportable weight of evidence. (The many people who to this day cling to the old biblical timescale have no such excuse.)
    And that’s it. Take heritable variation, the changeable environment, superabundance, and time. All these things can be seen—or, at least, understood—by anyone.
    So much for natural selection. What, then, about evolution? How is one related to the other? The terms are not equivalent, and that’s part of the problem. Here I hope to disentangle the word from some of its ancient baggage, look into its history as a word as well as a concept, and show what (I think) Darwin meant it to mean—which is (I think) rather different from what most people think when they use the term. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that it would be hard to find a worse choice of word than “evolution” to describe what Darwin, very sensibly, called “descent with modification.” To Darwin, the word “evolution” did not mean what we think it means today.
    As you might expect, the word has Latin roots. According to the online
Oxford English Dictionary
, henceforth
OED
, 7 the Roman writer Cicero used
evolutio
to mean the action of unrolling a scroll. Thus was born the concept of evolution as a process of development, elaboration, and, with it, revelation—that is, the deliberate transformation, by the action of unrolling, of a closed scroll to an open one whose information might be read: an orderly dance from simplicity into complexity. Medieval Latin texts use the term to refer to the passage of time during which any metaphorical unrolling might take place.
    The first recorded use of the word “evolution” in English was in 1616,in a translation of the
Tactics
by the second-century Greek military historian Aelian (Aelianus Tacticus), where it means, quite specifically, the movement of forces from one position to another:
    The nature of this Euolution is clearely to leaue the File-leaders in front, and Bringers-vp in reare.
    This nuanced view of evolution, as a series of maneuvers along a studied course from known beginning to desired conclusion, broadened to describe the occult movements of the wands of wizards, the gyrations of gymnasts, and, eventually, the choreography of dancers. The many examples given by the
OED
have one thing in common—that the term “evolution” in this sense came to encapsulate an exact, directed and predetermined series of events, as predetermined as a choreographed dance routine. More generally, the word “evolution” came to mean the opening out or unfolding of a series of events in an orderly succession, or the action of elaborating a simple idea into something more rounded, very much by analogy with Cicero’s unfurling scroll. As an aside, almost, consider this notable example from Erasmus Darwin’s
Zoonomia
(1801):
    The world . . . might have been gradually produced from very small beginnings . . . rather than by a sudden evolution of the whole by the Almighty fiat.
    Given what we think we know of evolution—as a gradual process—it is startling to come across Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus using the term in precisely the opposite sense.
    Those admen I lampooned in chapter 1 would find in the
OED
plenty of precedents for their use of the term