Malik argues that racial discourse and theories of racial difference arose in opposition to the universalist ideas of the Enlightenment, and gained their plausibility from "the persistence of differences of rank, class and peoples in a society that had accepted the concept of equality." (page 70) As the nineteenth century unfolded, the politically dominant classes appropriated science (particularly evolutionary theory) to support the idea of a natural order underlying social and economic inequalities, though nothing about the dynamic of science itself necessitated racial conclusions. Thus, "the discourse of race did not arise out of the categories of Enlightenment discourse but out of the relationship between Enlightenment thought and the social organisation of capitalism." (page 225)