CREATION BY EVOLUTION
logical guess is called a hypothesis, from a Greek work that means supposition or “guess”. The next step, of course, is to try to prove the correctness or incorrectness of the hypothesis. This may be done by reasoning out what consequences ought to follow if the hypothesis is correct, and then making further investigation to ascertain whether such consequences do follow in reality. If the hypothesis is found untenable it is abandoned. As Huxley once pointed out, the pathway of the history of science is strewn with abandoned hypotheses.
If a hypothesis is found to be valid, if the consequences postulated are realized in fact, then the hypothesis comes to be called a theory. A theory is a hypothesis that has been found to be in harmony with all the known facts, or with a vast majority of those facts. Eventually the conception called a theory may no longer be regarded as a theory but may be considered an actual fact or truth. Thus, our conception of matter as composed of atoms was at first a hypothesis; all that we knew suggested that idea. After undergoing rigid tests the atomic hypothesis became the atomic theory. Now we have, so to speak, handled atoms, and separated them into their component parts, so that atoms are no longer regarded as hypothetical or theoretical things but as actual facts.
So with the conception of the evolution of living things from earlier, simpler organisms to those now living. The idea was first a hypothesis, then a theory; and probably no living student of plants now doubts that evolution is a fact—that is, he believes that the present condition of the kingdoms of plants and of animals was attained by the process of evolution.
In the evolution of the plant kingdom the evidence available forces us to conclude that the earliest organisms were protein compounds endowed with these peculiar attributes:
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