The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution by Henry Gee Page A

“evolution” to refer to the refinement of consumer products (the first recorded such usage being in 1882). But in biology, as in life more generally, the term began to be used very much by way of analogy with Cicero’s original meaning—the elaboration of something simple into something more complex, such as a plant from a germinating seed, or the development of a butterfly from a caterpillar—like so many scrolls unrolling, each in its own precise, preprogrammed manner. Here is an entry from the earliest days of the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
, in 1670:
    By the word Change is nothing else to be understood but a gradual and natural Evolution and Growth of the parts.
    And once again from Erasmus Darwin:
    The gradual evolution of the young animal or plant from its egg or seed.
    As a term, evolution gets around. I haven’t mentioned the several different usages of “evolution” in mathematics, astronomy, and chemistry. All of the above, of course, is by way of a curtain-raiser to what the
OED
lists as sense 8 of evolution (out of eleven), namely “the transformation of animals, plants and other living organisms into different forms by the accumulation of changes over successive generations.” The first recorded use of “evolution” in this sense is in 1832, in Charles Lyell’s
Principles of Geology
, a work with which Charles Darwin was very familiar.
    The testacea of the ocean existed first, until some of them by gradual evolution, were improved into those inhabiting the land.
    As I noted, Darwin did not use the word “evolution” in the
Origin
(and continued not to do so until the sixth edition of 1873). He did, however, use the word “evolved.” It appears once, as the very last word in the book, the final word of a justifiably famous paragraph.
    There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
    It is important to remember that Darwin was no Darwinist. He could hardly have used the words “evolution” or “evolved” in the sense we generally understand them today, given that it was his own work that was largely responsible for altering the balance of their usage—from Cicero’s unrolling scroll, to the transformation of organisms over geological time. We, however, are in a different position. To us, the shade of Darwin looms large. His insights have colored the way we think of ourselves and our place in nature.
    So, when Darwin used the word “evolved,” it was in the earlier sense, of something unfolding. Creatures would appear, perhaps in successively more elaborate forms, from simple beginnings—perhaps as an analogy with the production of a shoot from a seed, or a frog tadpole from a mass of spawn. Darwin was a great believer in the power of analogy. After all, his entire argument about natural selection was based on just such a comparison with the “artificial” selection that stockbreeders use to enhance the desirable traits in their charges.
    Darwin, therefore, used the word “evolved” to mean growth and development of a complex form from a simpler one, and used it to draw an analogy with the altogether grander process in which life itself would from simple beginnings become more diverse, elaborate, and complex. Darwin had a term for this process to which evolution was a mere analogy: he called it “descent with modification,” a much less loaded term than “evolution.”
    In general, though, when scientists in Darwin’s time and earlier referred to the gradual change of species—what we today call “evolution”—they used the word “transformation.” If evolution meant the unfolding of individual organisms, from seed to shoot, from egg to adult, then transformation meant