Early usage and meaning of evolvability

Abstract

Evolvability has become an enormously popular concept in evolutionary biology and in machine learning software architecture. While it is claimed that the term was coined in 1988 by Richard Dawkins, it was used as early as 1931 as a characteristic of life by John A. Thomson. We quote and review the earliest uses and definitions of evolvability in biological frameworks up until 1989, which are remarkably few. The meaning changed from simply the “ability to evolve” as a characteristic of life to various versions of including necessary variation to predict whether or not something could evolve to the rate and quality of that evolution. Or, meaning changed from the ability to evolve to the “quality” of the ability to evolve. Since then, evolvability has taken on many definitions as it has exploded in usage.