In case you don’t read my much longer reply to you, the short version: evolution deals with NO philosophical issues whatsoever. It deals only with the mechanism by which new species appear. Any philosophical issues are ones brought out by those who think evolution conflicts with their religious beliefs. Other scientific theories have the same “philosphical issues”.
You are discussing the issue from a contemporary context.
The point you are making was much more ambiguous vis a vis what was considered evolutionary theory 100 years ago.
Evolution is an old philosophical doctrine going back to the Greco-Roman world with Lucretius and company, long before it became scientific. Darwin just took it and slapped biological labels on it. You also seem unaware that Newton was a Christian, and that early science was rooted in the Christian Middle Ages based on natural theology. Early Christian scientists believed that nature would work according to rational governing laws precisely because a rational Governor had made it. Such a worldview held sway until the doctrine of naturalism slowly replaced the natural theology that science was originally built upon. Naturalism is chock full of philosophical ideas like Romanticism and Existentialism that confuses such conceptions with a greater empiricism - or what they used to call, “nature looking into nature,” which submerges man into nature completely and prevents him from being on outside observer in the scientific process (hence holism which eventually led to fascism). I would also argue that Darwin also slapped biological labels upon Hegel’s philosophy of history.
However, although it is true Darwin himself has the reputation of being called the dismal scientist, i.e., the man who looks only at scientific materialistic explanations, he never divorced himself from the Romanticism that heavily influenced his own thinking. Nature alone was at the heart of Darwin’s thought just as much as any other Romantic philosopher of the 1800’s. Reducing man to an animal that has slowly evolved through the chance processes of natural selection is not exactly the best way to trumpet the humanistic accolades of modern science. Neither is the Darwinian descent of man fully submerged into a purposeless natural world of unintelligent outcomes a very good epistemological basis upon which to build objective scientific knowledge.
However, the whole point being here, is that science was always infused with a philosophical and theological worldview. The idea of a neutral science is a fantasy of the modern imagination ...