This is from Chapter 13, Year four EFM:

"Charles Darwin wrote Origin of Species in the context of Hegelianism. Although
he came to his views independently of Hegel, Darwin's theory of the evolution of living species by means of natural selection partakes of Hegel's notion of the dialectical movement of history, a worldview in which process is the dominant motif.

The concept that change is a major characteristic of life was by no means a new one. Aristotle had described the world of contingent reality as a teleological process of becomming, in which all things move toward their ends (teloi), drawn by attraction to "being-itself." But Aristotle's aim was to account for the changes that occur within individual entities, plants and animals that grow and objects that move. He did not suggest a universe in which new species came into being.

Hegel dared to suggest that the universe itself is in process--that even God changes and develops through the successive cycles of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Karl Marx developed Hegel's ideas and wrote that change is not an incidental and sometimes annoying characteristic of life, but the essential force that gives it meaning.

Christianity might have been expected to champion the notion of developmental change. Its Judaic heritage contained a thoroughgoing committment to the notion that history is a movement from creation to the ultimate fulfillment in the reign of God. As Marx pointed out, however, the church's investment in the social and economic conditions prevailing in any one historical period often made it an extremely conservative force, vehemently resistant to change. Even so, a worldview that saw change as central ought not to have been expected to send shock waves throughout Christian intellectual and religious world."