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What does the dreaded "E" word mean, anyway
Natural History, Feb, 2000 by Stephen Jay Gould
This interesting shift, despite Darwin's own reticence, occurred primarily because a great majority of his contemporaries, while granting the overwhelming evidence for evolution's factuality, could not accept Darwin's radical views about the causes and patterns of biological change. Most important, they could not bear to surrender the comforting and traditional view that human consciousness must represent a predictable (if not a divinely intended) summit of biological existence. If scientific discoveries enjoined an evolutionary reading of human superiority, then one must bow to the evidence. But Darwin's contemporaries (and many people today as well) would not surrender their traditional view of human domination, and therefore could conceptualize genealogical transmutation only as a process defined by predictable progress toward a human acme--in short, as a process well described by the term "evolution" in its vernacular meaning of "unfolding an inherent potential."
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Herbert Spencer's progressivist view of natural change probably exerted the greatest influence in establishing "evolution" as the general name for Darwin's process, for Spencer held a dominating status as Victorian pundit and grand panjandrum of nearly everything conceptual. In any case, Darwin had too many other fish to fry and didn't choose to fight a battle about words rather than things. He felt confident that his views would eventually prevail, even over the contrary etymology of a word imposed upon his process by popular will. (He knew, after all, that meanings of words can transmute within new climates of immediate utility, just as species transform under new local environments of life and ecology!) Darwin never used the "e" word extensively in his writings, but he did capitulate to a developing consensus by referring to his process as evolution for the first time in Descent of Man, published in 1871. (Still, Darwin never used the word "evolution" in the title of any book--and he chose, in his book on human history, to emphasize the genealogical "descent" of our species, not our "ascent" to higher levels of consciousness.)
When I was a young boy, growing up on the streets of New York City, the American Museum of Natural History became my second home and inspiration. I loved two exhibits most of all--the Tyrannosaurus skeleton on the fourth floor and the star show at the adjacent Hayden Planetarium. I juggled these two passions for many years and eventually became a paleontologist; Carl Sagan, my near-contemporary from the neighboring neverland of Brooklyn (I grew up in Queens) weighed the same two interests in the same building but opted for astronomy as a calling. (I have always suspected a basic biological determinism behind our opposite choices. Carl was tall and looked up toward the heavens; I am shorter than average and tend to look down at the ground.)
My essays may be known for their tactic of selecting odd little tidbits as illustrations of general themes. But why, to mark the reopening of the Hayden Planetarium, would I highlight such a quirky and apparently irrelevant subject as the odyssey of the term "evolution" in scientific, and primarily biological, use---thus seeming, once again, to reject the cosmos in favor of the dinosaurs? Method does inhere in my apparent madness (whether or not I succeed in conveying this reasoning to my readers). I am writing about the term "evolution" in the domain I know in order to explicate its strikingly different meaning in the profession that I put aside but still love avocationally. A discussion of the contrasts between biological evolution and cosmological evolution might offer some utility as a commentary about alternative worldviews and as a reminder that many supposed debates in science arise from confusion engendered by differing uses of words and not from deep conceptual muddles about the nature of things.
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