Jon,
Feel free to add any corrections you need to. I will try to find my sources for the various statements, which is not that easy, since I was making use of many books in my preparation. Any "fact" I gave, which you find incorrect, go ahead and correct. I will provide references when and if I can locate them.
You should know that I do not have lots of time to devote to this subject, since I am constantly studying and addressing subjects more pertinent to my field, which is biblical studies. I apologize for any factual errors that may have slipped into my off-the-top-of-my-head remarks.
The dog breeding information, I believe is common knowledge. If not, at least, I have never heard it challenged. My impression is that my statements about dog breeding reflected the uncontroversial state of the case.
One quotation to that effect is found in Phillip Johnson's
Darwin on Trial. After quoting evolutionary expert Pierre P. Grasse, saying:
"In spite of the intense pressure generated by artificial selection (eliminating any parent not answering the criteria of choice) over whole millennia, no new species are born. A comparative study of sera, hemoglobins, blood proteins, interfertility, etc., proves that the strains remain within the same specific definition. This is not a matter of opinion or subjective classification, but a measurable reality. The fact is that selection gives tangible form to and gathers together all the varieties a genome is capable of producing, but does not constitute an innovative evolutionary process...."
Johnson observes:
"In other words, the reason that dogs don't become as big as elephants, much less change into elephants, is not that we just haven't been breeding them long enough. Dogs do not have the genetic capacity for that degree of change, and they stop getting bigger when the genetic limit is reached." (pp.37f)
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As for the contents of the Cambrian rocks, I have read from various sources that virtually all invertebrate phyla are found there. Some sources say only one phylum is absent, whereas a source or two have said "very few" are absent. Not having counted the up the specimens one-by-one myself, and going on these common statements from authorities, I assumed virtually all invertebrates were found there. This would include centipedes and hermit crabs. My mistake!
Likewise, long ago I culled from the Time-Life book called "The Fishes" (by F. D. O'Manney) a quote that gave me the impression that the chordates were not found in the Cambrian. That quote is as follows:
"How this earliest chordate stock evolved, what stages of development it went through to eventually give rise to truly fishlike creatures, we do not know. Between the Cambrian, where it probably originated, and the Ordovician, when the first fossils with really fishlike characteristics appeared, there is a gap of perhaps 100 million years..."
I can see now that I was assuming the absence of fishes in the Cambrian was the same as the absence of chordates there (thinking the fishes to be the earliest chordates). The statement that the chordate stock "probably originated" in the Cambrian gave the impression that this was not certain, meaning the fossils for the chordates were assumed to be living in the Cambrian Period, but were not yet documented by fossil finds.
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The information about the scale/feather differences I found in Jonathan Sarfati (much maligned, I know, by evolutionists). He wrote:
"But scales are folds in skin; feathers are complex structures with a barb, barbules, and hooks. They also originate in a totalty different way, from follicles inside the skin in in a manner akin to mammalian hair." (In
Refuting Evolution, p.64)
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I was trying to remember the figure given by Dawkins of the information content of the cell. Did I actually say that he said "30 billion copies..." or did I say, "something like 30 billion copies..."? I don't remember my exact words, but "30 billion copies..." sounds like a hyperbole chosen, in the absence of the actual figure, to indicate an incredibly high number. Dawkins gave some astronomical figure, in any case, relating it to volumes of Britannica. I may have been combining his quote (in my mind) with the similar one from Carl Sagen:
“The information content of a simple cell has been established as around 10 to the 12th power [100 billion] bits, comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica.”
Carl Sagen, (The New Enclyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition, “Life,” 1986, Vol.22, p.987 )
100 million pages is obviously a far cry from "30 billion copies..." but the effect of the statistic is the same as that of the hyperbole. Even if it was a single volume of the Britannica, it would be sufficient to make the point that we are dealing with complex information here—not just random units thrown together. The number of volumes is immaterial to the point being made—it is sufficient to say it is an unfathomable amount of information to organize itself by chance, prior to the emergence of life (and thus prior to the process of natural selection).
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Only the scientists that believe in evolution are allowed to publish (Is there a list some place which we can reference of people who have been professionally discriminated against for creationism? I remember seeing one years ago but can not find it now)
Anyone can prove this for himself. Where is there a mainstream scientific journal that prints anything written by an intelligent-design-oriented writer? It is not that these writers lack scientific degrees or credentials or that they do no original research experiments or do not write articles. It is simply that their philosophy is not welcome in the naturalistic publications.
