Our times can lend ordinary words new shadings. It used to be that one thought of a fossil embedded in rock, but especially since the Iraq War, embed calls most immediately to mind a reporter covering military activity. In the same way, evolution these days is no longer about Darwin and finch beaks. Rather, the public figure opting to espouse a previously controversial position now tells us that their views have "evolved." It is, in truth, a weaselly business.

And a ubiquitous one. "The term 'evolving view' has been perhaps overused, but I think it is an appropriate term for me to use," Senator Lisa Murkowski said Wednesday, stopping just shy of endorsing gay marriage. What tipped the new usage would seem to have been President Obama's claim that his take on gay marriage was "evolving," after which he finally came out in favor. Since then Hillary Clinton tells us her views on gay marriage have "evolved," while Sean Hannity, not usually one for intellectual flexibility, has come out as having "evolved" on immigration.

But these evolutions seem always to be towards targets that will lend political advantage. Indeed, the word evolution is handy, in this new variation on its usage, in its connotation of progress, enlightenment. One once was lost but now one sees. One does not say, then, that one's views have simply changed, which would leave one open to the "flip-flopper" charge that so hobbled John Kerry in his attempt to elucidate his position on the War in Iraq. Unable to predict and embrace the current fashion for putting it as "evolution," Kerry was open to George W. Bush accusing him of being "for it before he was against it."

No one could get away with assailing President Obama with that kind of thing today on his position on gay marriage, because "evolution," in its Latinate air, connotes a classy intellection.

But there's more to it than that. "Evolution" carries an overtone of disconnection, as if the matter were being driven by abstract forces beyond. Natural selection, after all, is a faceless process, under which creatures transform over time as minor probablistic variations between individuals of a species lead some individuals to reproduce infinitesimally more than others, such that certain variations gradually become the default trait.