[Alamo-Girl]

No, because those people are acting in an official capacity as advisers and political philosophy is directly related to establishing public policy.

Well it is said that Obama met Ayers in the mid-1990’s but some researchers suggest he actually met him in the mid 1980’s. At neither time though was Ayers an official adviser.

And Frank Marshall Davis, a communist, was a friend and adviser to Obama when he was just a child growing up in Hawaii.

And then there’s Reverend Wright, a black liberation theologian with sympathies to anti-Israel regimes, who was his minister for more than two decades – longer than Obama has been in politics.

And so on.

None of these hold an official capacity as adviser, but a person would not be irrational to conclude they affected Obama’s thinking.

The association being made about Darwin are being made to "fill in the blanks" to build evidence with the objective of applying it to a theory based on a misperception that it is relevant to that theory.

That does not strike me as being a particularly sound methodology.

No doubt you see it that way, but there are also some, no doubt, who envision Darwin in family gatherings chatting with his cousin, Sir Galton, father of eugenics and consider other writings by Darwin – concluding that it affected his theory, the original title of which was “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”

Some no doubt would say that Darwin should get a pass on filling in the blanks because he was a scientist and Obama should not because he is a politician.

But others would say not so, because the way people look at the world around them can be influenced by many, that it would be a “non-sequitir” to conclude that because Darwin's theory is science it then therefore cannot influence the worldview of others.

And I would advocate on that point, that science is rooted in philosophy.

The word "science" itself is simply the Latin word for knowledge: scientia. Until the 1840's what we now call science was "natural philosophy," so that even Isaac Newton's great book on motion and gravity, published in 1687, was The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis). Newton was, to himself and his contemporaries, a "philosopher." In a letter to the English chemist Joseph Priestley written in 1800, Thomas Jefferson lists the "sciences" that interest him as, "botany, chemistry, zoology, anatomy, surgery, medicine, natural philosophy [this probably means physics], agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, geography, politics, commerce, history, ethics, law, arts, fine arts." The list begins on familiar enough terms, but we hardly think of history, ethics, or the fine arts as "sciences" any more. Jefferson simply uses to the term to mean "disciplines of knowledge."

Beginning of Modern Science and Modern Philosophy

And further, I agree that whether we are looking at the work of Aristotle or Galileo or Newton or Darwin or Einstein, their theories were far-reaching enough to affect the worldview of many.

[betty boop]

But others would say not so, because the way people look at the world around them can be influenced by many, that it would be a “non-sequitir” to conclude that because Darwin's theory is science it then therefore cannot influence the worldview of others.

It would be absurd to say that! Obviously, science affects the worldview of most conscious human beings nowadays. In particular, its materialism and determinism have for a long time been undermining traditional cultural and moral understandings of man and society, quite aside from transforming our view of the natural world.

I'm pretty ambivalent about Darwin. I wonder why a scientist would choose the title he did — On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life — for a scientific work. It seems more suitable for a myth. Or maybe a soap opera....

[Who's doing the "favouring?" Could a less emotionally-charged term have been found than "struggle for life?" Where is the much-touted scientific "objectivity" here?]

Thank you ever so much, dearest sister in Christ, for your outstanding analysis!