Posted at Evolution News Friday: In The Origin of Species (1859, 201), Charles Darwin suggested the following test, among others, for his theory:  If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory for such could not have been produced through natural selection. Now, there are thousands of different plant galls triggered correspondingly by thousands of different insect (and other) species showing, indeed, that “part of the structure of … one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species.” Getting to Know Plant Galls But perhaps I should first answer the question: What is a plant gall?  A gall is a manifestation Read More ›

Weigel takes to the pages of First Things and informs us that the United States has arrived at its sorry state because we have paid insufficient heed to Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde: For Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde diagnosed a primary cause of our current distress over half a century ago.  Böckenförde was a German constitutional law scholar whose “dictum” is familiar to, if often ignored by, political scientists: “The liberal secularized state lives on conditions that it cannot guarantee itself.” Put another way, the liberal institutions of a modern democracy—free speech, a free press, freedom of association, universal adult suffrage, majority rule and protection of minority rights, religious freedom, and so forth—rely for their credibility, and their tensile strength under pressure, on cultural foundations Read More ›