A widely held 19th-c belief that organisms - individuals, races, and even societies - were intrinsically bound to improve themselves, that changes were progressive, and that acquired characters could be transmitted genetically.
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.
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. 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is still used more widely and can refer to proponents of the theory of evolution through natural selection which has superseded the earlier biological theories, but particularly in the U.S.A. this term is used by opponents of the theory to bolster their claim that evolution theory is a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 science. 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. 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.
In modern times, the term evolution is widely used, but the terms evolutionism and evolutionist are rarely used in scientific circles. 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... early plants and animals sprang from the early earth's own substance because of the insistence of the atoms that formed the earth;
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. 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.
Evolutionary Thought in the Modern West before Darwin
Robert Carneiro, the anthropologist, describes the progression of evolutionary thought at two levels. (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.
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;
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. 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!"
He describes how the animals compete with each other, driven by "three great objects of desire," namely sex, hunger, and fear.
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. 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." 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.
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.
According to Huxley, he could not believe the creationists, because they had no convincing evidence.
But according to Huxley, Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species provided the first explanation that was better than creation.
Not surprisingly, when Huxley tried to explain Darwin's working hypothesis to creationists, he encountered interesting resistance to examining reality. 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." 487/1)
By 1872, in some scientific circles, the term evolutionism was used only to refer to life-form processes such as natural selection. 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."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. 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 . 348)
Evolutionism 1875 to the present
Summary of the Second, Fifth Chapter of Robert Carneiro's Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A Critical HistoryCultural anthropology
Lewis Henry Morgan.History of ideas
Arthur LovejoyMarxist thought
There is no direct connection between Marxist thought and Natural Selection theory; they consider entirely different subject matters, the former is concerned with a supposedly superior form of social structure, the latter with the evolution of animal and animal genetics over time.
However, in the Soviet Union, the scientific theory of evolution was neglected in favor of Lysenkoism, a variant of Lamarckism, which says that acquired traits are inherited to the next generation.
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 JudaismModern 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 billions of years 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, assisted suicide, 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". 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."
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