Close Reading

I think I was watching a clip of Miley Cyrus. I was scrolling through Twitter and didn't linger on it long enough to be sure, only long enough to catch the words, "I've evolved in front of you all." This put me in mind of something that intermittently troubles me: the paradox at the heart of the contemporary use of the word 'evolution'. The word is associated now mainly with Darwin, but I'm not sure we have Darwin to blame for that . I am intrigued by this question: how was 'evolution' used and what did it mean, before Darwin arrived to bring to public consciousness those ideas of natural selection and " descent with modification " with which the word then became associated? Etymology Online gives us clues, but not much more: https://www.etymonline.com/word/evolution#etymonline_v_29764 The paradox at the heart of current use is this: it seems to lean on the authority of Darwin's theory, which has become, at least in reputation, among

 I can't help thinking this is an example of infelicitous phrasing, though I am sure others will find it very felicitous: "Meanwhile, the UK government recently recognised that their close evolutionary cousins – crabs and lobsters – as sentient, and proposed legislation that would ban people from boiling them alive." This is the source text: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211126-why-insects-are-more-sensitive-than-they-seem?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB In context, the sentence is more easily understood, but I still naturally -- without straining to -- misunderstood it on first reading. This example is amusing, of course, but increasingly I find this kind of slipshod prose irritating. It's like being served by a waiter who takes no care to keep his thumb from entering your soup as he places it in front of you.  The text in question, apart from its entertaining ambiguity, also contains an unnecessary 'that' on which I stub my metaphorical toe as