I think I have a very “scientifically minded” biblical world view, but this one had me spill my coffee:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/science/earth/22fossil.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=fossils&st=cse
“Team Claims it has found oldest fossils.”
Then when you get to paragraph seven:
“Cell-like structures in ancient rocks can be deceiving — many have turned out to be artifacts formed by nonbiological processes. In this case, the geologists have gathered considerable circumstantial evidence that the structures they see are biological.”
You rarely get to read what the scientists wrote. You most often get to read what a journalist thinks the scientists meant. Salt, grain etc.
As badly written as it is, that’s serious business. Bacteriae often look in fossils like strings of beads; you know, exactly like a stream of bubbles. “Circumstantial evidence” here could mean something like traces of amino acids, and that would be quite useful (in contrast to what “circumstantial evidence” formally means).
That said, in general I think that non-direct, not reproducible evidence like fossils must be taken as guidance, not as a primary clue to generate models. Evidence or not, it must be noticed that it could be just bubbles.