Who was the first to talk about evolvability?
My literature searches have turned up dead ends, so this is less of a full answer and more of some groundwork, but Google ngrams suggests somewhere around 1931 for the first usage, with meaningful usages beginning in earnest int he early 70s.  Their book previews from that era are sadly lacking; I can't find the usage of the ones from the 40s and 50s they do list sadly, but there are definitely some misnomers that show up in programming.  There's a 1973 work and one from 1977 that at least appear to be the correct usage, with the one from 1973 using it as a "new" concept.