356 RAYMOND J. NOGAR 



phers and theologians, who fail to draw the line between their 

 scientific foundations which are firmly supported by evidence 

 and their philosophical, or, more generally, ideological specu- 

 lations. At one moment, they speak about biological or an- 

 thropological or cosmic evolution, and suddenly, without warn- 

 ing — and perhaps without knowing it themselves — they univer- 

 salize evolutionary theory into a causal cosmic law and begin 

 to draw philosophical conclusions about the universe in which 

 we live. To the observer untrained in the logical arts, evolu- 

 tionism, historicism, existentialism, mechanistic or even dia- 

 lectical materialism may seem to be the necessary consequences 

 of contemporary " evolutionary fact." 



A few examples taken from current scientific thinking on the 

 subject of evolutionary theory will illustrate this unwarranted 

 extrapolation from the " fact of evolution " to the " philosophy 

 of evolutionism." Rensch, after enumerating scores of rules of 

 evolution, says: 



It was necessary to enumerate these rules, in order to evaluate the 

 degree by which the primary undirectedness is changed into a 

 forced evolution . . . (Italics added.) ®^ 



He then infers that the evolutionary rules and laws are complex 

 manifestations of the universal laws of causality, and that each 

 epigenetic development of the process was necessarily deter- 

 mined and implicit in the former stages through the universal 

 laws of causality.^® His final conclusion follows: 



Summing up, we may assume that the whole evolution of the 

 cosmos including the evolution of living beings, was pre-existing in 

 consequence of the " eternal " cosmic laws of causality, parallelism 

 and logic. However, up to now, such an assumption can be only 

 a philosophical working hypothesis.^" 



In Rensch's statement there is some token of warning that 

 this inference is really an assumption in the philosophical 

 order. Other scientists, however, argue a more direct philoso- 

 phy of evolutionism from the data of the " fact of evolution " 



''EAD, I, 110. "EAD, I, 113. '" Loc. cit. 



