Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 418
SURVIVAL BY ACCIDENT OR DESIGN? prey in air or on land, continue to eliminate the weaker and less capable of survival among them. Of course they do not discriminate intentionally, but the stronger, the faster and also the comparatively more clever members of the species naturally stand a better chance of escape. . Likewise, in the area of reproduction, the stronger and more powerful male members of a species at a time of mating, stand a much higher chance of succeeding than those who are weaker or suffer from other disadvantages. . Hence, in the ultimate analysis, it is the hand of death which serves the cause of life. At this level this phenomenon is easy to observe and natural to operate, requiring no specific design for it to prevail. But this principle is not only at work in relation to the competition between members of different species; it also operates more subtly and far less perceivably in an inner area of the functions of life. . For every child which is conceived by a mother, billions upon billions of chances of conception are sacrificed. Most people do not know the fact that every healthy male has been gifted with a reproductive potential capable of producing billions of offspring during an average life span. But it is only a few sperm during the entire lifetime of a man which are fortunate to succeed in fertilizing a female ovum which results in the possible birth of a child. Even if a man can boast of having produced a hundred offspring in a primitive society, where unrestricted polygamy is practised, the number of his reproductive sperm, potentially capable of fertilizing a female egg, outnumber the actual conceptions by an enormously large proportion. But even the billions of sperms which fail the test of natural selection, do not die in vain. Their death guarantees that only the most competitive and the most worthy of survival is ushered into the next generation of 407