Good read. I think a lot of people forget that Jefferson was very young when he drafted it. He was not so far removed from university. You tend to get really excited about cutting edge ideas while in college. I'm sure he was no different. There's no doubt that science played a major role in his thinking. A favorite passage from the article:In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson proclaimed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident….” In an earlier draft, he had written, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.” Whether it was Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin who introduced the change (scholars now favor Jefferson), “self-evident” sounds more blunt, more down-to-earth, as in, “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that these things are true, King George.”