CREATION BY EVOLUTION
Greek botanist, a pupil of Aristotle, who was also a botanist, classified plants, according to their most obvious resemblances and differences, as trees, shrubs, half-shrubs, and herbs. This was a very superficial classification, but it took centuries of study by many keen minds to enable us to distinguish between essential and superficial or accidental differences and likenesses. According to the classification of Theophrastus, roses and apples fell into quite diverse groups, but in the modern classification they are placed in the same group. Other systems of classification are briefly indicated in Fig. 1.
Again, in contemplating this exhibit, one cannot help but ask himself the question, “How did all this orderly diversity come about? Have all of these various kinds of plants always existed? If not, which existed first? If they have not always existed, by what method were they created?”
It has been very natural for men to overlook the last question, and merely inquire, “By whom were they created?” This is a very proper question to ask, and full of absorbing interest, but if one has the scientific type of mind, he is not satisfied with this question, nor with any answer that may be given to it. We said above that one cannot help but ask himself the question, “How did all this orderly diversity come about?” But the scientist does not ask himself this question; he puts the question directly to Nature and seeks his answer there. He wishes to know not only who, but how.
Each question is important, but the answers are likely to lead in different directions. One who was content merely to know who made the first telephone could never have invented nor helped to invent the radio; that could have been done only by one who insisted on knowing the how and the why—the structure, the mode of action, the underlying principles of the Bell telephone. In acquiring this knowledge it was not necessary for him to forget the inventor
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