Evolution and Development: Terms and Concepts

Abstract

Given the changing definitions of evolution and development, and the long-standing and much debated relationships between the two terms and concepts, it is appropriate at the outset to define evolution and development, to prescribe the limits of the concepts embraced by the two terms, and to examine the history of the interactions and conflicts between these two fields of scientific, philosophical, metaphysical, ethical and often religious enquiry.

‘Evolution, development (of organism, design, argument, etc.); Theory of E. (that the embryo is not created by fecundation, but developed from a pre-existing form); origination of species by development from earliest forms.’ Concise Oxford Dictionary, 5th edn., 1969

‘The dead hand of the past still produces effects in the present through the conservatism of language.’ Woodger, 1945, p. 95