Quandaries

the system set up by the Bush administration — and ratified by Congress — was fraught with the risk of error because the detainees had no right to counsel, no meaningful way of knowing what the allegations against them were, and no chance to rebut evidence against them.

The cases ruled on Thursday were the first to provide all of those safeguards, and in five of the six cases, Leon concluded there simply was no corroborated evidence against the men and that indeed, the sole basis for their detention was a single uncorroborated piece of raw intelligence.

Seven years of waiting for our legal system to give these men an answer, he said, is long enough.

"There was a lot of eye-wiping and handkerchief-reaching; it was very emotional," Waxman said. "I mean these guys have been held for seven years following their detention investigation in Sarajevo."

The men were arrested in their homes

Thursday's ruling will likely be seen as a signal to other judges to be skeptical of the government representations.

"Our soldiers working with the Bosnian government see terrorists who are plotting to bomb our embassy," Bush said at the time. The government, however, later abandoned this claim and moved on to a number of other claims, which similarly were later withdrawn when they could not be substantiated.

Some Christian movements still make opposition to evolutionary theories a litmus test of faithfulness and – the other side of the coin – many believe Darwin’s theories to have fatally undermined religious belief and therefore reject any accommodation of one by the other.

At a university in Kansas, I asked a biology professor how he coped with teaching Darwin’s theories to students whose churches insisted that evolution was heresy and whose schools taught creationism. “No problem,” he replied, “the kids know that if they want a good job they need a degree, and if they want a degree they have to work with evolution theory. Creationism is for church, as far as they’re concerned. Here, they’re Darwinists.”

But he was also pointing to young lives which could not be lived with integrity – the very opposite of how Christians are called to live. There is no integrity to be found either in rejecting Darwin’s ideas wholesale or in elevating them into the kind of grand theory which reduces humanity to the sum of our evolutionary urges.

Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still.

Protocell researchers are trying to design a completely novel form of life that humans have never seen and that may never have existed.