Wordorigins.org

Charles Darwin will forever be associated with the “Theory of Evolution,” but while Darwin is the father of modern evolutionary theory, he is not the first to use that term to describe the gradual change in living things over time.

The word evolution is from the Latin evolutionem, which meant the unrolling of a scroll (book). It was used metaphorically to describe the orderly playing out of preordained events. From Henry More’s Complete Poems (1647):

Evolution Of outward forms spread in the worlds vast spright.