lpetrich
17 Mar 2009, 07:01 AM
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 1868 in a sample of seafloor mud. He called it Bathybius haeckelii in honor of Ernst Haeckel's speculations about the ancestral "Urschleim" ("original slime").
But Bathybius was nowhere to be found in seafloor samples dredged up by the Challenger expedition of 1872, and in 1875, the ship's chemist showed that it was a side effect of the preservative used on the sample. It was calcium sulfate precipitated by alcohol. Thomas Huxley conceded that he had to "eat leeks" as a result of his mistake, though Ernst Haeckel supported it until 1883.
-
Turning to Canada, in 1864, 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 thinking that it was some giant foraminiferan, he named it Eozoon canadense.
But that identification provoked a couple decades of fierce controversy, with more skeptical geologists claiming that it was the result of separation of minerals under great heat and pressure (metamorphism), and that it had none of the characteristic features of foraminiferans. Many geologists became convinced that it was nonbiological, and the issue was settled for everybody but Dawson when Eozoon was identified in blocks of limestone ejected from Mt. Vesuvius around 1894.
Interestingly, Dawson had the opposite sort of belief 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. However, like many early-19th-century reputable creationist biologists, he had believed in Hugh-Ross-like old-earth creationism and not young-earth creationism.
-
Some people tried to link the two; I recall that there were some people back then who considered Eozoon a fossil of Bathybius!
Fast-forwarding to the present, some creationists gloat over Bathybius and Eozoon as examples of how wrong mainstream biologists can be. However, I have this picture of an IDer gloating about all the specified complexity that Eozoon had -- before it was found in that Mt. Vesuvius limestone.
It may seem odd that a volcano can eject pieces of limestone, but those pieces 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.
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 1868 in a sample of seafloor mud. He called it Bathybius haeckelii in honor of Ernst Haeckel's speculations about the ancestral "Urschleim" ("original slime").
But Bathybius was nowhere to be found in seafloor samples dredged up by the Challenger expedition of 1872, and in 1875, the ship's chemist showed that it was a side effect of the preservative used on the sample. It was calcium sulfate precipitated by alcohol. Thomas Huxley conceded that he had to "eat leeks" as a result of his mistake, though Ernst Haeckel supported it until 1883.
-
Turning to Canada, in 1864, 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 thinking that it was some giant foraminiferan, he named it Eozoon canadense.
But that identification provoked a couple decades of fierce controversy, with more skeptical geologists claiming that it was the result of separation of minerals under great heat and pressure (metamorphism), and that it had none of the characteristic features of foraminiferans. Many geologists became convinced that it was nonbiological, and the issue was settled for everybody but Dawson when Eozoon was identified in blocks of limestone ejected from Mt. Vesuvius around 1894.
Interestingly, Dawson had the opposite sort of belief 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. However, like many early-19th-century reputable creationist biologists, he had believed in Hugh-Ross-like old-earth creationism and not young-earth creationism.
-
Some people tried to link the two; I recall that there were some people back then who considered Eozoon a fossil of Bathybius!
Fast-forwarding to the present, some creationists gloat over Bathybius and Eozoon as examples of how wrong mainstream biologists can be. However, I have this picture of an IDer gloating about all the specified complexity that Eozoon had -- before it was found in that Mt. Vesuvius limestone.
It may seem odd that a volcano can eject pieces of limestone, but those pieces 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.