It's a happy Darwinian world after all...

I haven't been posting much lately for the simple reason that all that seems to be coming out from the ID camp now-a-days is mere random moaning about ... whatever they feel like moaning about. I keeping with their fashion of not proposing any positive evidence for their "theory" they seem to even having stopped attacking evolution and are now merely attacking the irrelevant personal opinions of "evolutionists" - dead or alive.

The latest in line to do so is none other than Bill Dembski. On march 20th, under the heading "It's a happy Darwinian world after all..." he quotes a passage from Darwin's "The Descent of Man" where Darwin presents some rather interesting views regarding the traits that should be passed down in human societies (as a side note, the entire book "The Descent of Man" can be read online). Darwin's views were no doubt wrong much for the simple reason that he seems to have thought that in regards to "nature vs nurture" human traits (he was mostly talking about behaviour in this particular chapter) seem to have been firmly decided by nature (i.e. behaviour is passed along from parent to offspring genetically/deterministically not because it is learned). Bill, of course, brings this up not because Darwin was wrong but because it is an easy target for "evolution-bashing". Bill, like many of his ilk, seems to have a hard time separating the scientific hypotheses/theories proposed (that have changed in the last 150 years, btw) from the views expressed by the theory's originator. The validity of a scientific explanation does not rest on the niceness of the person proposing it, but on the evidence supporting it.

Why is that so hard to understand?