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Just finishing this one by Richard Dawkins. In the past he keeps referring to the overwhelming evidence for evolution via natural selection and in this book he goes through some select offers. The examples given are fascinating. It is not a pure science book and he still has his sights still clearly focused on the 40% and 60%ers ie those in the US who literally believe in Noah's Ark and a young earth and swipes are made at them now and then. At times this leads to a bit of silliness eg why if all species dispersed uniformly from the same point in the middle east 4000-6000 years ago from a big boat do we only get marsupials in Oz and monkeys in some areas and lemurs in others etc however, I guess some people need to hear this.

good read

Is it better the next time around?

When you take out the Dogma and look at what some creation scientists are saying, there is actually a logical answer to this. They don't deny Natural selection, they just disagree that it's a creative process. They assume that animals began with a perfect genome, and that naturally this is breaking down through mutations over time, and when you consider Natural selection in this context, it leads to diversity in the same way as Evolutionists believe.

The main challenge to Darwinian theory is that observed mutations have always been shown to decrease the functionality of a protein, which may give an advantage which can be selected, however the function of that protein, to my knowledge, has never been found to have been recovered. The recovery of function would require a constructive mutation, and despite Dawkins ridicule of creation science, I've yet to hear an adequate explanation of how he accounts for the lack of this in observed science. If one of these books often reviewed in this forum actually tackles this issue head on, or even if one tackles Michael Behe's challenge regarding irreducible complexity of biological systems (another biochemical problem), please let me know which they are, as I'm keen to hear the other side of the argument. Until then, I find Dawkins a good speaker, but a difficult man to take too seriously, as I never see him tackling the real challenges and too often he resorts to ridicule in order to support his argument. We know far too little about the whole process to be resorting to ridicule, and like it or loathe it, creationistis are coming up with some good arguments.

with regard to the above there are a few issues:
1) when you state creation scientists it sounds like an organised bunch of people but in reality none of them agree between themselves..ie no amount of natural selection can create such massive diversity as we see in 6000 years.
2)what you outline seems to go against many experiments I have read. In particular take e-coli experiments which have show that given enough mutations e-coli (which normally metabolise glucose) can mutate to the point that it can change enough to enable it to metabolise another food source entirely in addition to glucose. The huge improvement did not diminish its original capability it was an entirely additional capability in an identical environment over 35000 generation (every day they put half of yesterdays colony in a new flash and fed it the same broth for 25 years) This and many more fascinating experiments are in the book. Well worth a read

Behe essentially claims that irreducibly complex systems cannot be produced directly by gradual evolution ie

(P1) Direct, gradual evolution proceeds only by stepwise addition of parts.
(P2) By definition, an irreducibly complex system lacking a part is nonfunctional.
(C) Therefore, all possible direct gradual evolutionary precursors to an irreducibly complex system must be nonfunctional.

sounds good but the 1st part of the argument is wrong.. evolution can also change or remove parts. In contrast, Behe's irreducible complexity is restricted to only reversing the addition of parts. This is why irreducible complexity cannot tell us anything useful about how a structure did or did not evolve.

eg a stone bridge:
A clear example of this is a simple stone bridge. Consider a crude "precursor bridge" made of three stones. This bridge spans the area needed to be crossed and is thus functional. For step one of the evolution of the bridge, a part is added: a flat stone on top, covering all precursor stones. Whether this improves the functionality of the bridge is irrelevant — it may or may not, the bridge still functions. Now remove the middle stone. Voilá, we have an irreducibly complex bridge, since the last step made the top-stone necessary for the function but only simple gradual steps were used to create this.

There are plenty of biological examples of the stone bridge effect.

this page has in interesting article by behe and a response by miller which uses behe's own pet mousetrap argument against him

http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/nhmag.html

there are string of essays here
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html
showing why Behe is just wrong.