I The Method of Argument

The Method of Argumen the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1958) devotes less than a quarter of a page to the concept of creationism, while fourteen pages have been devoted to the concept of organic evolution. In this article too, the evolution of life has been postulated as a fact and it is stated that after Darwin, this concept has received general acceptance among scientists and the educated elite. What precisely are those arguments in favour of organic evolution, which have caused scholars of the modern age to accept the ‘truth’ of this concept? Here, in order to analyze the nature of those arguments I shall deal with some of their more basic aspects. 1. The study of animal life shows that inferior and superior species exist. They range from the single-cellular to creatures with millions and billions of cells, as well as differing in the quality of their functional properties. 2. When this initial observation is linked with the fossils preserved in the various layers of the earth’s crust, it is shown that there is an evolutionary order relative to the point in time they appeared on earth. The fossils of the life forms that inhabited the earth millions of years ago are still extant, buried in the earth. These fossils reveal that in ancient times, the animal species living on earth were simpler in form, then gradually evolved into more complex and developed forms—meaning thereby that all of the present forms of life did not come into existence at one point in time, but that the simpler forms came first, and the more developed forms came at a later stage. 3. A salient point is that in spite of the obvious differences in the vast numbers of living creatures, the latter are marked by many resemblances in their biological systems. For instance, a fish resembles a bird; a horse’s skeleton resembles a man’s, and so on. It follows from this that all the living species are descended from the same family and have a common ancestor. 4. How did one species follow another? This becomes clear to us when we consider that when an animal gives birth to