From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishevolutionaryev‧o‧lu‧tion‧a‧ry /ˌiːvəˈluːʃənəri◂, ˌevə- $ ˌevəˈluːʃəneri◂/ ●○○ AWL adjective 1 HBrelating to the way in which plants and animals develop and change gradually over a long period of time the evolutionary development of birds Some scientists have rejected evolutionary theory.2 CHANGE FROM ONE THING TO ANOTHERrelating to the way in which ideas or situations gradually change and develop over a long period of time He is in favour of gradual, evolutionary social change.
Examples from the Corpus
evolutionary• In fact, without evolutionary and learning pressures, the society of mind in a brain would turn into a bureaucracy.• evolutionary biology• It follows from all this that natural selection can not be the sole explanation of evolutionary change.• He thinks they have reached an evolutionary dead end.• The sequence adjacent to the insertion site is very well conserved over large evolutionary distances such as between fungi, algae and bacteria.• The evolutionary history of Figure 4 is a reconstruction.• Spontaneous social orders, by contrast, are evolutionary in nature and are not the product of rational design.• The one exception to this evolutionary process will be in new plants or divisions-the so-called greenfield sites.• an evolutionary process• He also uses the idea of mankind as food to emphasise the evolutionary truth of man as one more source of protein. 