I think that in this quote Dobzhansky is using the term evolution so broadly that it is almost meaningless scientifically. While I can't get access to the article 'Changing Man' that the quote comes from (
Dobzhansky, 1967) in his famous '
Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution' article he quotes Teilhard de Chardin and it illuminates where he is coming from ...
Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems much henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow this is what evolution is.
This seems to be taking evolution in its older and broader sense of the unrolling of something and it relates to De Chardin and Dobzhansky's theistic positions. They both seem to see the history of the cosmos as an unrolling of god's plan, in which the evolution and spiritual development of man is the current highest point on the way to some even grander evolutionary future (ultimately to what De Chardin called the Omega Point).
If we wanted to use this thinking to re-frame the title of this thread it would be that Biological evolution is not Abiogenesis. I was going to say Biological evolution is not Chemical evolution, but Chemical evolution itself is a term with many different connotations, although many of them would be in sympathy with De Chardin and Dobzhansky's line of reasoning such as the creation of chemical elements during nucleosynthesis.
We might further phrase the distinction as being between the evolution
of life and the evolution
to life.
As I said, I think this paints evolution rather too broadly, and certainly much more broadly than it is generally understood either on this site or in the biological sciences.
TTFN,
WK
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