Human biological evolution vs societal evolution
Initial Definition of evolution
The definition for evolution in Wikipedia
EvolutionĀ is change in theĀ heritableĀ characteristicsĀ of biologicalĀ populationsĀ over successive generations.
Which is a pretty good initial definition, aside from one element, the biological element, I see evolution as the concept of successive changes in traits towards a vast array of problem domains over iterations, the problem domains, ie requirements, may not stay the same between iterations and iterations may not be rigidly defined.
Distilled definition of evolution
I may define evolution in an even more distilled manor, evolution is trial and error with persistent memory. Simple, yet sufficient for this thought experiment
In Depth Personal Definition of evolution
Evolution as a concept is a conglomeration of two simple concepts, trial and error and keeping knowledge.
As long as something has those two traits, and the two relay on each-other, I would say it is evolution
If you just know things, that's not evolution. If you just try many things until one works, that's not evolution. Instead, if you do both, try things until one works, then store that information and continue to the next layer, then that would be evolution.
The two concepts can be joint without being evolution, for example, a brute force approach to crack a password. The computer knows about the possible solutions theoretically, then it attempts (trial and error) each one in turn.
Two parts that touch us every day
Now, in the development of Humanity, there are a few elements that relay on evolution, the simplest one would be genetic evolution, where each iteration is a "trial" for a set of genes based on the last with slight changes. Then there is social evolution, an evolution of ideas that are meant to better humanity
It's important for us to understand the distinction between the evolution of the human species in terms of genes and the evolution of the human society