Icons of ID: Another false positive?

Posted 27 July 2004 by PvM

↗ The current version of this post is on the live site: https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2004/07/icons-of-id-ano.html

Thanks to Nobody on ARN I was made aware of the following story on Growing Tiny Totally Tubular Formations

Would this be another example of false positive for an ID hypothesis?

Tubular structures found on a Martian meteorite had been suggested as evidence of life, he said.

Goldstein pointed out that finding a chemical means to grow such self-organizing systems highlights the fact that living organisms are not needed to create such structures.

2 Comments

Chuckie Wuckie · 27 July 2004

Ah, but surely you aren't going to claim that intelligence was not necessary to grow David Stone's tubules????? After all, Stone didn't discover tubules growing in the wilds of nature. Far from it:

To expand Stone's carport experiment, he and Goldstein used a setup similar to that used for electroplating. They constructed a rectangular glass chamber about four inches tall with a positively charged iron electrode on the top and a negatively charged iron electrode on the bottom. The researchers filled the container with mixture of water, ammonium, iron and sulfates and turned on the current. The electric current split water into hydrogen and oxygen. As expected, tiny hydrogen bubbles gathered on the negatively charged electrode, grew larger and then broke away. To the researchers' surprise, after tens of minutes the electrode was covered with a forest of small tubes, which the scientists dubbed "ferrotubes."

Thus, intelligence was required to create those tubules after all. Surely God was pleasantly surprised when He first gazed upon woman, standing before him, naked in the flesh. I know I sure the hell was.

John Wilkins · 27 July 2004

A possible case of this "in the wild" might be Phillipa Uwin's "nanobes". This ability for things to self-construct at nanometer scales might be ubiquitous.