18 September 2020
Charles Darwin will forever be associated with the theory of evolution, but he was not the first to use the word evolution to describe the development of species, nor did he use that word when he first published his ideas on natural selection.
Evolution comes from the Latin evolutio, which meant the unrolling of a scroll. Cicero uses it in his De finibus bonorum et malorum (Regarding the Limits of Good and Evil):
Quid tibi, Torquate, quid huic Triario litterae, quid historiae cognitioque rerum, quid poetarum evolutio, quid tanta tot versuum memoria voluptatis affert?
(What pleasure do you Torquatus, or does Triarius here, receive from literature, from history and learning, from the unscrolling of the poets, from memorizing so many verses?)
There are a number of senses of evolution in English, starting in the early seventeenth century. Most of them relate to a twisting or unfolding motion or to an orderly progression of change, but I’m going to focus on the biological senses.
The first sense of evolution in biology refers to the growth and development of an animal or plant, from egg or seed to mature form. This sense is in place by 1670, when it appears in a review of the book Historiæ generalis insectorum by Dutch naturalist Jan Swammerdam in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society:
First, It lays down the Ground of all Natural Changes in Insects; declaring, that by the word Change, is nothing else to be understood but a gradual and natural Evolution and Growth of the parts; not any Metamorphosis or Transformation of them: which Growth is here made to resemble, not only the Increase of other Animals, but also the Budding, Knitting and Spreading of Plants.
Use of evolution to mean the develop of and changes in species also predates Darwin. That sense appears in Charles Lyell’s 1832 Principles of Geology:
Of the truth of the last-mentioned geological theory, Lamarck seems to have been fully persuaded; and he also shews that he was deeply impressed with a belief prevalent amongst the older naturalists, that the primeval ocean invested the whole planet long after it became the habitation of living beings, and thus he was inclined to assert the priority of the types of marine animals to those of the terrestrial, and to fancy for example, that the testacea of the ocean existed first, until some of them, by gradual evolution, were improved into those inhabiting the land.
Darwin didn’t invent the theory of evolution—as with so many scientific breakthroughs, he built upon ideas that were circulating at the time. His key contribution was in describing the mechanism of natural selection. And he didn’t use the word evolution in the first, 1859, edition of his Origin of Species, probably because of the older sense referring to growth and development of an organism. But he did use the word in the sixth, 1873, edition of his book:
At the present day almost all naturalists admit evolution under some form.
And:
Every one who believes in slow and gradual evolution, will of course admit that specific changes may have been as abrupt and as great as any single variation which we meet with under nature, or even under domestication.
Just as Darwin didn’t invent the theory of evolution, he wasn’t the coiner of that phrase. That honor goes to Herbert Spencer, who used it in 1858, the year before Darwin published his version of the theory:
Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none. [...] We may safely estimate the number of species that have existed, and are existing, on the Earth, at not less than ten millions. Well, which is the most rational theory about these ten millions of species? Is it most likely that there have been ten millions of special creations? or is it most likely that by continual modifications, due to change of circumstances, ten millions of varieties have been produced, as varieties are being produced still.
Spencer is also credited with coining the phrase survival of the fittest and was one of the originators of Social Darwinism, the now discredited idea that extends the biological idea into society and ethics.
Sources:
Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum. H. Rackham, trans. London: W. Heinemann, 1921, 1.7, 26. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species, sixth edition. London: John Murray, 1873, 201. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology, vol 2 of 3. London: J. Murray, 1832, 11. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, s.v. evolution, n.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 5. London: John Martin, 1670, 2078. Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Spencer, Herbert. “The Development Hypothesis.” Essays—Scientific, Political, and Speculative. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858, 389–90. HathiTrust Digital Archive.