evolution

noun evolutions

1. countable, uncountable A manoeuvre of troops or ships. Mean while, he never failed to be present, when any regiment, or corps of men, were drawn out to be exercised and reviewed, and accompanied them in all their evolutions […].
2. countable, uncountable A turning movement, especially of the body. Our necromancer […] taking up his wand, waved it around his head in a very mysterious motion, with a view of intimidating these forward visitants, who, far from being awed by this sort of evolution, became more and more obstreperous […].
3. countable, obsolete, uncountable A turned or twisted shape; an involution, a complex or intricate shape. ‘It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crouded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists.’
4. archaic, countable, uncountable The act or process of unfolding or opening out; the progression of events in regular succession. The world […] might have been gradually produced from very small beginnings […] rather than by a sudden evolution of the whole by the Almighty fiat.
5. countable, uncountable The opening out of a curve; now more generally, the gradual transformation of a curve by a change of the conditions generating it.
6. countable, historical, uncountable The extraction of a root from a given power.
7. countable, uncountable The act or an instance of giving off gas; emission. Allantoxaidin is decomposed on heating, with evolution of ammonia and cyanic acid.
8. countable, uncountable Development; the act or result of developing what was implicit in an idea, argument etc. The ongoing evolution of Lolita subculture fashion includes, among other things, the ballet style.
9. countable, uncountable A process of gradual change in a given system, subject, product etc., especially from simpler to more complex forms. Among other forms of change, the evolution of transportation has involved modification, diversification, convergence, divergence, hybridization, differentiation, and naturally, selection.
10. countable, uncountable The transformation of animals, plants and other living things into different forms (now understood as a change in genetic composition) by the accumulation of changes over successive generations. […]and thus he [Lamarck] 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.

Opposite: stagnation, revolution, extinction