No, it isn't. Or if it is, it's barely better, not much better. See my lengthier reply above.
The reason why this is false is because in biology, there is an enormous correlation structure in which, to a good approximation, everything is correlated with everything. If you take a random gene, its expression will be significantly correlated or anticorrelated with well over half of all other genes. Probably over 80% if I remember correctly. Depends on the number of samples, if you get into 10K+ samples it approaches 100%.
In an area like aging, skin wrinkling is correlated with sarcopenia is correlated with atherosclerosis is correlated with number of senescent cells is correlated with all kinds of gene and metabolite expression levels etc ... you get the idea.
In genetics a SNP will be correlated with hundreds of thousands of other SNPs.
I guess you can go so far as to say correlations can generate hypotheses. People certainly do this all the time. But "a correlation is tentative evidence of direct causation" is just wrong. Technically it is evidence, it's just that in my experience in biology it is such weak evidence as to be useless without other evidence.