lpetrich

That was a title of one of Stephen Jay Gould's Natural History essays, though when he reprinted it in a book, The Panda's Thumb, he changed the "meets" to "and".

These were the famous early-life flubs from the middle of the 19th cy., which suggests that identifying living things can be problematic -- which suggests that inferring design can be at least as problematic, and not nearly as mathematically well-defined as Dembski, for example, seems to think.

Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's bulldog himself, had "identified" it in a sample of seafloor mud, and called it Bathybius haeckelii in honor of Ernst Haeckel's speculations about the ancestral "Urschleim" ("original slime"?).

However, it not only did not grow, it turned out to be a side effect of the preservative used on the sample -- it was calcium sulfate precipitated by alcohol.

And over in Canada, a certain John William Dawson had found some distinctive green-and-white layering in some limestone along the Ottawa River west of Montreal; he thought that it was too organized to have a nonbiological origin, and named it Eozoon canadense.

But that identification provoked an abundance of controversy, and this question was only settled when Eozoon was identified in blocks of limestone ejected from Mt. Vesuvius. This meant that it was most likely a product of metamorphism, and not the remains of some organism.

Interestingly, Dawson had the opposite perspective from Huxley and Haeckel; he believed that Eozoon was a special creation distinct from the special creations of later life, because there was such a big gap in architecture between them.

But IIRC there were some who considered Eozoon a fossil of Bathybius!

Fast-forwarding to the present, some creationist sites gloat over Bathybius and Eozoon. However, I have this picture of an IDer gloating about all the specified complexity that Eozoon had -- before it was found in Mt. Vesuvius limestone blocks.

[ May 21, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>

Quetzal

As a sort of interesting aside, Dawson didn't get everything wrong. Andrew McRae's excellent TalkOrigins FAQ on <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/trees.html" target="_blank">polystrate trees</a> has an excellent excerpt from Dawson's 1868! book debunking the old creationist argument that these formations had to have been formed by Noachian flood. Odd that the modern cretinists are still using the same tired old arguments that were disposed of 134 years ago!

MrDarwin

I'm still trying to figure out how a volcano ejects limestone.

lpetrich

Those pieces of limestone had been broken off by upward-flowing lava and carried up and out. Such rocks are sometimes called xenoliths; they have been known to emerge from various other volcanoes.

KeithHarwood

Creationists are still using the sea-shells on top of mountains bit, and that was disposed of by Leonardo Da Vinci over 500 years ago. I think it fair to say that they are a little behind the times.