The different meanings of the word "evolution" have a common part:gradual change from one state to another. Prominently at the entrances of all the dictionaries are the definitions that refer to evolution, so that, by saying "evolution" is understood to speak of thebiological concept.
* STARTING THE fixism:
Although the old Anaximander of Miletus (sixth century BC) had already intuited the idea of evolution of living beings, has defended Western thought until past half century, a conception of life fixist. According to the fixity, both nature and living species are final and finished a reality: living things are unchanging forms, and today as they were designed from the start. Obviously, the fixity was mated to creationism. Even the great Swedish botanist Carl von Linné (1707-1778), author of the celebrated classification or management of all living creatures into genera and species, based similarities and proximities between forms of life, never wrote about the possibility of a common origin similar species. The species had been created in a separate and independent.
Paleontology and comparative anatomy, science born in the early nineteenth century, provided data that questioned the conception fixist. Both animal fossils never seen more strange and unbelievable were the more ancient geological strata, and the similarities and correlations between different agencies, including the extinct forms, made when scientists were in a situation disturbing and disruptive.George Cuvier (1769-1832), the founder fixist comparative anatomy, tried to solve the conflict by suggesting that the Earth had suffered frequent cataclysms or catastrophes like the flood of the Bible, which led to the extinction of all species and, then, new forms were created.