Evolutionism

Evolutionism, from the Latin evolutio, unrolling, refers to theories that certain things develop or change as natural (unplanned) outgrowths of those that existed before, in contrast to beliefs that these things are fixed and immutable. An evolutionist is a proponent of such a theory. Theories of change have been developed across several fields of study.

In anthropology and biology, the term Evolutionism is nowadays used specifically for historical theories or beliefs of early sociocultural evolutionism developed in the 18th and 19th century that organisms are intrinsically bound to improve themselves through progressive changes that are heritable. This idea was applied to cultures and societies as well as to living organisms. The term evolutionist is still used more widely and can refer to proponents of the theory of evolution through natural selection which has superseded the earlier biological theories, but particularly in the U.S.A. this term is used by opponents of the theory to bolster their claim that evolution theory is a belief, or ideology (compared with other ideological "isms"), rather than a scientific theory. The term is rarely used in the scientific community, as evolution is overwhelmingly accepted there. The terms are still used for theories about the development of cultures and civilisations.

Development of usage
Anthropologists and biologists will refer to "evolutionists" in the 19th century as those who believe that the cultures or life forms being studied are evolving to a particular form. (see Platonic form). Very few scientists today, if any, believe that evolution in culture or biology works that way, and serious discussions generally take caution to distance themselves from that perspective.

Since evolutionary biology explains changes in terms of internal processes and gradual development as natural (unplanned) outgrowths of what existed before, generally such theories have no role for divine intervention, and can include the idea that the first living things arose by random events in an abiotic world. Even before the 19th century, there were a few hypotheses about the evolution of everything material: suns, moons, planets, earth, life, civilization, and society--all without divine intervention. The number of hypotheses being propounded increased dramatically in the middle of the 19th century.

In modern times, the term evolution is widely used, but the terms evolutionism and evolutionist are rarely used in scientific circles. However, all three of these terms are commonly used by anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars outside the physical and life sciences; these terms are used to refer to theories about the development of cultures and civilisations.

Scientists object to the terms evolutionism and evolutionist because the -ism and -ist suffixes accentuate belief rather than scientific study. Conversely, creationists use those same two terms partly because the terms accentuate belief, and partly perhaps because they provide a way to package their opposition into one group, seemingly atheist and materialist, designations under which many scientists would not like to be cast. Thereby the creationists deride the scientists' theories as mere belief that ignores divine intervention, contrary to what creationists think is a more preferable explanation.

Ancient Evolutionary Thought
Anaximander is generally agreed to have been the first Greek thinker to propound evolutionary ideas. Empedocles, quoted by Aristotle, went further and gave a hypothetical description of evolution that is startlingly similar to natural selection ('Why should not nature work... of necessity? ....(some) things survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way; whereas those which grew otherwise perished and continue to perish.'). By 400 BC the Greek atomists were teaching that the sun, earth, life, humans, civilization, and society emerged over eons from the eternal and uncreated atoms colliding and vibrating in the void--all without divine intervention. In the epic poem On the Nature of Things, the Roman atomist Lucretius in about 60 BC described the stages of the living earth coming to be what it is. "The earth and sun formed from swirls of dust congregated from atoms colliding and vibrating in the void; early plants and animals sprang from the early earth's own substance because of the insistence of the atoms that formed the earth; the aging earth gave birth to a succession of animals including a series of progressively less brutish humans that made a succession of improved tools, laws, and civilizations with increasing complexity finally arriving at the current earth and lifeforms as they are." . These ideas were more or less forgotten about in the West for the next 1400 years although they continued to be discussed in the Islamic world (see for example the writings of Ibn al-Haitham, Nasir al-Din Tusi and al-Biruni).

At the same time as the Greeks (or even slightly earlier) there were also proto-evolutionist and evolutionist concepts being expressed in the Indian and Chinese worlds. In the Vedas of Hinduism there are opaque but suggestive passages which indicate that more complex phenomena rose out of simpler phenomena. Buddhist metaphysics (which tended to emphasise the extent to which peoples and creatures rose and fell, frequently over vast periods of time) also contained much that is of an evolutionary nature (see Buddhism and evolution for further details). In China, according to Joseph Needham, "“the Taoists elaborated what comes very near to a statement of a theory of evolution. At least they firmly denied the fixity of biological species."

Evolutionary Thought in the Modern West before Darwin
Robert Carneiro, the anthropologist, describes the progression of evolutionary thought at two levels. First, there was the succession of explanations that did not require divine intervention. And second, there were occasional uses of derivatives of the Latin word "evolutio," meaning "unroll like a scroll," to label the explanations. Carneiro describes it this way: "In the seventeenth century, 'evolution' began to be used in English to refer to an orderly sequence of events, particularly one in which the outcome was somehow contained within it from the start." Since the outcome was already contained within every prior stage of the earth, life, and universe, everything would happen as it has without divine intervention. (Carneiro 2003:1)

In giving an example of an early form of evolutionism theory, Carneiro notes that Gottfried Leibniz in 1714 explained the motion of objects by the "monads" inside them where the monads operated by internal forces, so no outside force was required to make things happen as they did. The historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy points to the "monad" or "germ" idea as a characteristic of typical evolutionary thought from 1700 to 1850; as such, it maintained that "the 'germs' of all things have always existed . . . [such that they] contain within themselves an internal principle of development which drives them on through a vast series of metamorphoses" through which they become the geological formations, lifeforms, psychologies, and civilizations of the present (Lovejoy 1936:274).

An early application of evolutionary thinking to biology was Charles Bonnet's 1762 assertion that each feature of the embryo was preformed in the parts; some of the parts came from the egg and some came from the sperm. Bonnet hypothesized that when the embryo grew, those preformed parts merely expanded, shifted, and rearranged themselves to grow into the adult. Hence, Bonnet was called a "preformationist." This idea long preceded modern embryology.

Carneiro conjectures that it was this "preformationist" connotation of the word "evolution" that caused Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in 1809 to exclude the word "evolution" from his 1809 treatise Philosophie Zoologique. For Lamarck proposed that a parent's learning to play an instrument would be passed on to the children as acquired traits--the direct opposite of the popular notions of "evolution" at the time which asserted that the parent passed on the "germs" given by the grandparents unaltered by the parent's learning. (Carneiro 2003:2)

After Erasmus Darwin established his medical practice in Derby, England, he began to put to paper in 1780 his many speculations on the processes that made the current 1) geological formations, 2) lifeforms, 3) psychological types, 3) star systems, 4) science advancements, and 5) political reforms. Erasmus Darwin wrote most of his speculations on the evolutionary processes in verse form. He made the most complete statement in a poem he first titled "Origin of Society," but he changed the title to "Temple of Nature." In the poem, he describes the beginning of life and the formation of the diverse life forms. Against a vast cyclical background of star formation and collapse, he describes the eons of time until a "general conflagration" in which the planets and sun fall into "one central chaos" from which new earths sometimes appear, "Which in process of time may again undergo the same catastrophe!" Between the times of conflagration, he describes the spontaneity with which life springs forth again to populate the earth.


 * Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
 * Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;
 * First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
 * Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
 * These, as successive generations bloom,
 * New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
 * Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
 * And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.

He describes how the animals compete with each other, driven by "three great objects of desire," namely sex, hunger, and fear. Through the competition, "the strongest and most active . . . [will] propagate the species, which should thence become improved."

Paul Elliott summed up Erasmus Darwin's writings this way, "Five interconnected aspects of [Erasmus] Darwin's Enlightenment evolutionary worldview may be discerned: geological developmentalism, biological evolutionism, developmental psychophysiology, cosmological developmentalism, and scientific and political progressivism." (Elliott 2003)

Furthermore, Erasmus Darwin was an organizer of a group of amateur scientists around Derby that would remain influential into the 1850s, the time of his grandson Charles Darwin. Erasmus Darwin became the first president of the Derby Philosophical Society, which was something of a gentleman's social club, literary society, and scientific forum for discussing recent scientific discoveries and publications. Around Erasmus Darwin, there formed a small lively amateur scientific community that included the grandparents of Herbert Spencer. Herbert Spencer's father would become an active amateur scientist and speculator on evolutionary processes in his own right, and when he grew up would become the secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society. Herbert Spencer would later develop a vast evolutionary theory of his own that included cosmological, geological, biological, social, and cultural processes.

Evolutionism from 1836 to 1869


Charles Darwin wrote his entire 1859 First Edition of Origin of Species without using the word evolution in it. (Nor did he use the word evolve, though he used evolved once, at the end of the last sentence in the book: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed 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.")

The word evolution in popular use in 1859 applied to a speculative explanation of how the world and life could be created from chance, probabilities, and the mere physical properties of atoms without ever an intervention of a Creator. For example in 1836, the month after Darwin returned from collecting his specimens and data on the Beagle, The Times summarized "Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise: Geology And Mineralogy Considered With Reference To Natural Theology," and that 1836 review already contained the creationist argument that evolution was wrong because all variety of animals were found in the same geological strata: "The investigation of the newer transitionary strata assures us by their remains of the cotemporaneous existence of the four divisions of the animal kingdom, vertebrata, mollusca, articulata, and radiala--a fact which at once and for ever annihilates the doctrine of spontaneous and progressive evolution of life, and its impious corollary, chance." (The Times, Nov. 15, 1836, p. 3, col. E)

Though Darwin continued to exclude the word evolution from the first five editions of Origin of Species, Darwin's contemporaries, notably Herbert Spencer argued publicly that the theory of evolution explained how the universe, the world, animals, plants, civilization, ethics, laws, and art would result from the probabilities inherent in atoms that found themselves in favorable circumstances. For example, Spencer concerned himself with explaining how human culture and civilization would result from mere probabilities inherent in favorable circumstances even in the absence of a Creator's plan for how people should live. A Creator was not required to explain civilization, order, ethics, law, harmony, or beauty. Accordingly in 1851, eight years before Darwin's First Edition of Origin of Species, Spencer wrote: "[C]ivilization no longer appears to be a regular unfolding after a specific plan; but seems rather a development of man's latent capabilities under the action of favourable circumstances; which favourable circumstances, mark, were certain some time or other to occur. Those complex influences underlying the higher orders of natural phenomena, but more especially those underlying the organic world, work in subordination to the law of probabilities." 

Like Spencer, Thomas Huxley concerned himself with explaining how a world of sunlight, seas, rocks, gases, and trace minerals without a Creator could generate the full span of life, intelligence, and civilization. And according to Huxley, he argued often with Spencer about what mechanism could cause the "transmutation" from one type of animal to another, but Spencer could not provide a convincing mechanism. And in Huxley's words, "even my friend's rare dialectic skill and copiousness of illustration could not drive me from my agnostic position. I took my stand upon two grounds: firstly, that up to that time, the evidence in favor of transmutation was wholly insufficient; and, secondly, that no suggestion respecting the causes of the transmutation assumed, which had been made, was in any way adequate to explain the phenomena." 

According to Huxley, he could not believe the creationists, because they had no convincing evidence. "And, by way of being perfectly fair, I had exactly the same answer to give to the evolutionists of 1851-8." 

But according to Huxley, Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species provided the first explanation that was better than creation. "That which we were looking for and could not find, was a hypothesis respecting the origin of known organic forms, which assumed the operation of no causes but such as could be proved to be actually at work. We wanted, not to pin our faith to that or any other speculation, but to get hold of clear and definite conceptions which could be brought face to face with facts and have their validity tested. The 'Origin' provided us with the working hypothesis we sought." 

Not surprisingly, when Huxley tried to explain Darwin's working hypothesis to creationists, he encountered interesting resistance to examining reality. One observer noted the following event where Huxley in 1860 attempted to get the audience to deal with the empirical data on "Origins."


 * I was happy enough to be present on the memorable occasion at Oxford when Mr Huxley bearded Bishop Wilberforce. There were so many of us that were eager to hear that we had to adjourn to the great library of the Museum. I can still hear the American accents of Dr Draper's opening address, when he asked `Are we a fortuitous concourse of atoms?' and his discourse I seem to remember somewhat dry. Then the Bishop rose, and in a light scoffing tone, florid and he assured us there was nothing in the idea of evolution; rock-pigeons were what rock-pigeons had always been. Then, turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey? On this Mr Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before us, and spoke those tremendous words - words which no one seems sure of now, nor I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to carried out: I, for one, jumped out of my seat; and when in the evening we met at Dr Daubeney's, every one was eager to congratulate the hero of the day. I remember that some naïve person wished it could come over again; and Mr Huxley, with the look on his face of the victor who feels the cost of victory, put us aside saying, 'Once in a life-time is enough, if not too much.'

There are also other versions of this same event from other observers who claimed to have been there. 

Evolutionism from 1869 to 1875


In 1869, Thomas Huxley used the term evolutionism to refer to gradual geological processes when he wrote of the "three schools of geological speculation which I have termed Catastrophism, Uniformitarianism, and Evolutionism." (Scientific Opinion, Apr. 28, 1869, p. 487/1)

By 1872, in some scientific circles, the term evolutionism was used only to refer to life-form processes such as natural selection. Under this emerging usage, the term evolutionism specifically did not apply to either geological processes or to the origin of life as in abiogenesis. Thus, one reviewer wrote, "Evolutionism does not propose to explain the unfolding of life out of dead matter." (E. Fry, Spectator, Sep. 21, 1872, p. 1201)

Though Darwin had excluded the words evolution and evolutionist from the first five editions of Origin of Species, he imported both of the terms evolution and evolutionist into his Sixth Edition in 1872, as illustrated in the following examples.
 * "If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection."
 * "It is admitted by most evolutionists that mammals are descended from a marsupial form; and if so, the mammary glands will have been at first developed within the marsupial sack."

In 1872, The Times published a review of Darwin's book The Expression of the Emotions. Darwin attributed much of the human emotional capability to an inheritance from the common ancestors of today's animals: "A fierce sneer, in which the upper lip is retracted and the canine tooth exposed on one side alone, Mr. Darwin ventures to say, 'reveals man's animal descent.'" The reviewer finds fault with the mechanical determinism in Darwin's analysis that attributes too much to "our early progenitors" and not enough to the person's consciousness. Then the reviewer says: "His [Darwin's] thorough-going 'evolutionism' tends to eliminate from the developed human form any relations beyond those of the bare mechanism of animal existence." (The Times, Dec. 13, 1872; pg. 4, col A)

During this period, evolutionism was used to label scientific theories that explained the presence of humans on this earth without assistance from divine intervention. For example, one opponent of Darwin's theory of evolution said, "Evolutionism . . . excluded creation and theism." (Sir John W. Dawson, The Story of the Earth and Man (1873), p. 348)

Evolutionism 1875 to the present

 * Summary of the Second, Fifth Chapter of Robert Carneiro's Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A Critical History

Cultural anthropology

 * Lewis Henry Morgan. Human civilizations develop linearly in a "sequence of progress" from savagery, through barbarism, to finally civilization; see Linear progress (Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society, 1877)
 * Neo-evolutionism

Sociology

 * Sanderson, Stephen K. (1997). "Evolutionism and its Critics." Journal of World-Systems Research 3: 94 - 114.
 * Sanderson, Stephen K. (1990). Social evolutionism: A critical history. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

History of ideas

 * Arthur Lovejoy

Marxist thought
In the Soviet Union, the Darwinian evolution was neglected in favor of Lysenkoism, a variant of Lamarckism, which says that acquired traits are inherited to the next generation. The theory was eventually discarded, but not before significantly retarding development of Soviet agriculture and Soviet biological sciences before these disciplines were restored to a sound scientific footing.

Main article: Dialectical materialism

Secular Judaism

 * Judaism, the secularization of Messianism into two optimistic views of progress: 1) economics of socialism or 2) politics of Zionism; see Judaism

Modern controversies
Today, the scientific community rarely uses either of the words evolutionist or evolutionism. However in America, the National Center for Science Education does use the related term "anti-evolutionism" to label the organized political and religious movement that opposes the teaching of evolution in public schools. For example, the National Center for Science Education website is dedicated to "defending the teaching of evolution in public schools," and that website offers the "resource" of a page about "Dealing with Anti-Evolutionism." 

In contrast, the words evolutionist and evolutionism are widely used by creationists and others in the United States who are opposed to the theory of evolution; they use those two words to imply that the scientific community's attachment to the theory of evolution is a matter of religious faith and is just another -ism, not a matter of scientific proof.

Furthermore, Young Earth creationists sometimes use the term evolutionism to attack the empirical methods of science generally, such as attacking geology and astronomy which have concluded that the Earth and the universe are roughly a million times older than the young-earth creationists believe.

Opponents of evolutionary theory may also use the words evolutionist and evolutionism to characterize the philosophical systems that they attack, such as atheism, agnosticism, secular humanism, rationalism, and materialism. Also the opponents of evolution argue that the evolutionist faith in evolutionism entices people into political ideologies such as fascism, communism, and Marxism. Additionally, the opponents argue that the evolutionist's belief in evolution leads to disregard for the value of life, which disregard creationists perceive to be manifested in eugenics, euthanasia, and abortion.

In 1994, John Peloza, a high school biology teacher in California, U.S.A., sued his school board in federal court, claiming that he was being forced to teach the "religion" of "evolutionism". The federal court dismissed the case, holding that Peloza's suit was "frivolous" and requiring Peloza to pay the school board's attorneys' fees and court costs. When Peloza appealed, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the claim of frivolity and the assignment of fees, but otherwise upheld the lower court's dismissal. Notably, the Court of Appeals held that evolution (as it was taught) said nothing about "how the universe was created" or "whether or not there is a divine Creator"; and moreover that "evolution" and "evolutionism" are not religions, so the state can teach them in public schools as long as it does not teach a "belief that the universe came into existence without a Creator."