> Why does Adam Wiggins repeatedly use the word 'evolve' as a transitive verb in an awkward fashion? I suppose "awkward" is in the eye of the beholder. This us

> Why does Adam Wiggins repeatedly use the word 'evolve' as a transitive verb in an awkward fashion? I suppose "awkward" is in the eye of the beholder. This usage is standard enough to be in every dictionary I know. As Oxford succinctly puts it, the word means "develop gradually" — and much like the word "develop," it can be either transitive or intransitive. > Evolve to me connotates natural selection -- which is rather more haphazard than I would hope for from a engineering process. Even in biology, there have been several other theories of evolution than natural selection (e.g. Lamarckism and artificial/theistic evolution). The others became disfavored in biology as it became obvious that natural selection was indeed the best explanation of how evolution worked in nature, but natural selection has never been an inherent aspect of the word "evolution."