[USFRIENDINVICTORIA]

Was there ever a point where the Theory of Evolution was called the "Hypothesis of Evolution"? If so, when was that? At what point was it dubbed the "Theory of Evolution"? What criteria did the ToE have to meet in order to be elevated from the status of "hypothesis" to that of "theory"?

Just asking.

[spunkets]

"Was there ever a point where the Theory of Evolution was called the "Hypothesis of Evolution"?

If so, when was that?"

On the Canary islands, on the Beagle and for the time time Darwin pondering and was collecting his evidence.

[Virginia-American]

Was there ever a point where the Theory of Evolution was called the "Hypothesis of Evolution"?

Not exactly; start with the "Law of Faunal Succession".

From here:

In 1790, while engineering canals to link Britain's looming industrial age together, William Smith observed that fossils of invertebrate animals found in the rock layers appeared in a predictable sequence. From this observation the Law of Faunal Succession was developed and stated that fossils occur in a definite, invariable sequence in the geologic record.

There were a number of hypotheses proposed to explain this: they all involved some sort of evolution, but the mechanism was not exactly clear: EG Lamarck had the theory that acquired characteristics were heritable, Cuvier had another theory, and so on.

Darwin's big contribution to this was the theory that the same mechanism that allowed animal breeders to breed new varieties of, say, dog or pigeon, was all that was needed to explain the observed law, and also to account for all living species.

Based on this, he also made a number of predictions, all of which have turned out to be true:

For example, the ancestors of modern people would be found in Africa (Homo erectus, H. habilis, Australopithecus, et al); or that there were animals intermediate between whales and land-based mammals (EG, ambulocetus, pakicetus).