FACT OF EVOLUTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTIONISM 351 



excessively uncritical naivete of the statement made to science 

 teachers attending the last session of the five day Panel at the 

 Darwin Centennial Celebration: 



Properly taught, the knowledge which our students gain should 

 produce in them a sense of the universality of evolutionary pro- 

 cesses, from the prebiological molecular level through the pre- 

 human world to man with his physical, mental, and sociocultural 

 development, thus integrating the physical, biological, and social 

 sciences, and, through history, the humanities. This sense of change 

 leads to the habit of " thinking of reality in terms of process " 

 rather than in terms of static situations/* 



Careful delineation of the wide varity of meaning attached to 

 the concept " fact of evolution " gives us a well focused view of 

 both the power and the limits of evolutionary theory. The 

 theory is a very complicated combination of univocal, ana- 

 logous and equivocal statements, especially when an attempt is 

 made to apply it to every scientific area of study. Some of these 

 statements are strongly supported by evidence and securely 

 drawn inferences; others are hopeful hypotheses and arbitrary 

 assertions. Perhaps Beckner's summary of evolution theory in 

 biology is a fair evaluation of evolutionary thought in general: 



My own view is that evolution theory consists of a family of related 

 models; that most evolutionary explanations are based upon as- 

 sumptions that, in the individual case, are not highly confirmed; 

 but that the various models in the theory provide evidential sup- 

 port for their neighbors.^^ 



Part II: To the Philosophy of Evolutionism 



As long as the " fact of evolution " is understood in its wide 

 variety of equivocal senses, variously substantiated with that 

 degree of probability presently afforded by the methodology 

 used in each scientific discipline, the true value of the diachronic 



"J. C. Mayfield, "Using Modern Knowledge to Teach Evolution in High 

 Schools," Graduate School of Education Symposium of the Darwin Centennial 

 Celebration. (Chicago, 1960) p. 7. 



" M. Beckner, The Biological Way of Thought (New York, 1959) p. 160. 



