Evolution explains these the same way it explains everything else, through gradual change guided by enviromental pressures.

The videos make two well known arguments:

"God of the Gaps"

"Irreducible Complexity"

For the first, saying "we don't know how this happened" does not mean that god did it. Many unkown natural causes (lightning, volcanoes, the motion of the stars, etc) have been attributed to the workings of various gods, and through investigation have all been shown to have natural causes. There is nothing that suggests the questions raised in the video will be any different.

For the second, many seemingly irreducibly complex systems have been shown to break down into manegable transitions. Again, there is nothing to suggest that these will be any different.

Mod Edit: Post Deleted

Spamming and "calling out" members of RRS is not allowed.

The first video is laughable. It's a classic case of working backwards: We see an end result and assume that everything worked towards it.

Which it doesn't.

The other videos are variations on this theme.

Evolution explains this quite easily: Natural selection. At each stage there were probably hundreds of unsuccseful mutations over vast numbers of years who did go extinct. However, some made it through because of the advantage their traits had.

The person narrating the film - Dr Jobe Martin - keeps saying he doesn't understand how evolution could do this and that's precisely the point: He doesn't. I woud point out that Dr Martin's qualifications in biology are at undergarduate level and geared towards his training as a dentist in which he holds his doctorate. His other higher qualifications are in theology and business studies.

In other words he has no grounding in evolutionary biology outside the fundamentals taught at undergraduate level. Hardly an authority to dictate on what is and isn't possible.

His children are also home schooled which further demonstrates Dr Martin's unwillingness to expose himself or his family to mainstream academia.

Make of that what you will.

Ajay - as for your post, you have been debunked more times than a seaman in a violent storm in the topic you mention. There is no need to continue to do so in this topic.

The commenter on the first video does not understand evolution. He thinks that evolution has to provide a use for morphological developments (e.g., the "minnow" on the mussel) after they are developed. This is a theistic way of thinking. Theists think that form follows function (e.g., a designer decides what function he wants to achieve, and then builds the appropriate mechanism to achieve that function). But evolution teaches us that function follows form. That is, forms will arise accidentally, and are then propagated if they are useful (or eliminated if they are injurious).

This insight alone explains the whole of the first video. It is also why animal characteristics are not always useful. (Notice that "not useful" does not always mean "injurious.") If a designer had thought about them ahead of time, they wouldn't be there.

But let's get back to the video. How can we explain it? Here's a possibility: Imagine that some of the mussels develop a little flag that accidentally attract local fish. At first, the flag is useless. It is a mutation. After some generations, one of the mussels develops a tendency to shoot its larvae out when rubbed up against. These two developments would provide the basis for the result we see in the video after many generations of evolution.

Of course, it's important to remember that bass and mussels evolved together. It's not like bass, and minnows were all evolved when these mussels arrived on the scene. So the mussel can develop advantageous characteristics over a long period of time. The commentator is wrong that the "very first" mussel had to use this mechanism and use it successfully. The mussel only has to be somewhat successful (the least bit advantaged over its kin) to have its traits propagate. Over time, natural selection will perfect its advantage. Also, evolution teaches us that there was no "very first" mussel. There is a only gradient of forms descending back to some common ancestor.

So the commentator is ignorant about how evolution works. This is typical of most people who think they have an example that refutes evolution. Also, he thinks that just because he can't provide an explanation, that there probably isn't one. But given the fact that he is so misinformed, it's no wonder he can't come up with an explanation!

Although the conclusions the commenter wants us to draw from them are wrong, these videos are pretty cool. They demonstrate exactly what amazing things nature is capable of when left to its own devices.

The commenter keeps saying things like, "If this wasn't so, such-and-such would go extinct." Exactly! The reason why these creatures and plants have made it to the present day is that they evolved just right to survive together! The ones that didn't develop advantageous qualities went extinct.

I just watched the first video. You asked how does evolution account for such coordination between two totally different creatures?

The simple answer for that is coevolution. You can read a bit about that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-evolution

You deniers of evolution really go at the whole thing with challenges to evolution the wrong way. You use "How could evolution explain this?" as a purely rhetorical question. As if our lack of understanding of how the natural world works means that it must have, by default, been the work of a supernatural creator. The CORRECT way to go about answering these challanges to evolution is to think and think and experiment and work and think some more until we FIND OUT how evolution accounts for whatever it is. Not just give up and say it's just too hard to figure out. You (creationists in general) just assume you know the answer and don't even bother really investigating. This is proven by your use of the question "How could evolution explain this?" 

I only needed to watch 3 minutes of the first video before it was too obvious for words that the guy speaking was presupposing that both fish and muscle had always been the way they were. Every creationist assumes that in evolution, every species evolves on it's own without any input from the environment or other species, plainly ignoring the basic tenets of evolution in the first place. Even if I could watch the second two videos, and I can't, it's obvious that there's nothing of any value being brought against evolutions facts in this topic.

No naturally occuring mutation has ever been witnessed to be anything other than good (if I am mistaken, you know how to reply and give your example(s)).  It is always either neutral or negative. And a lot of mutations have been observed...not just hundreds. Darwinian Evolution however requires untold numbers of these changes to create new genetic information. Mutations however are scrambling and or duplicating of existing genetic information.  No new information is added.

I will suppose for a moment that new information be somehow added, by means that go against currently observed processes. With whom,then, would that new species mate? Not only does the theory (of one kind of organism slowly evolving into another) mandate a mate for the new mutant, it mandates that the mutant have a mutant with whom it can mate within the same time period in the same region on Earth.  And then at least most of the previous species would need to die out to prevent the new couple's offspring from getting mixed back into the gene pool of the previous "inferior species." 

What I have read in these previous posts is a lot of imagination, but no observation, and hypothesizing and testing and conclusion.  Isn't this the foundation of science?

As for the mussel, evolution theorizes that it formed from a more primative form of life which I would assume reproduced by a means other than the mussel currently does.  Either the mussel always preproduced by its current means or it didn't.  If it did, then it would have to get it right the with the first organism not to face extinction or diluting back into the population.  If it didn't then how did the initial mussel offspring manage to attain nutrition? Why did evolution deem it necessary to strip the mussel of a much more efficient asexual or orthodox means of reproduction in exchange for this overly complex, risky and seemingly unneccessary superfluous means of reproduction? Blind tinkering of an invisible force has never been observed in the history of science to produce levels of complexity as these, it tends empirically instead to entropy...how does adding hundreds of millions of years change that?

Mutation is not necessary for evolution. Sexual reproduction combines genetic traits to produce unique traits in each generation.

Also, we have not observed a significant proportion of all the mutations that occur, and certainly not over the time scales under which evolution occurs. So we really don't know what the rate of advantageous mutation is in nature. And neither do you or your creationist friends. 

There's no need for information to be added, just to be organized in different ways.

Evolution proceeds in tiny increments. Two lizards have a baby with harder scales around its mouth that make it better than its peers at cracking seed shells. It is still a lizard, still able to mate with its peers and is in fact more successful at doing so because of all the yummy seeds it gets to eat. It passes its hard mouth along to some of its offspring. Those offspring are in turn more successful, the others are not. It doesn't take many generations before the whole population of lizards in that area have hard mouths. A few million years and numerous other changes later and the mouths are now beaks and the lizards are chickens and not able to mate with their old genome.

Inductive theorizing from the evidence is very much part of science. Plus, there is tons of evidence for evolution and all its processes. Finally, if you want to present a better supported theory, be our guest.  

Here's a step-by-step scenario that COULD explain how the mussel evolved this reproductive method. I admit that I have no evidence for the truth of any of this. However, since all you are saying is that this method COULDN'T have evolved naturally, all I have to do is show that it theoretically could, and you are refuted.

1. There is an ancestral mussel that reproduces by spraying its larvae into the water and hoping that some of them stick to fish, plants or other sources of nourishment. We see that in nature in other species already.

2. A mussel happens to have a smaller shell which leaves part of its insides fluttering around in the current. This attracts fish. Because there are usually fish nearby when it blows its larva load (sorry) a higher percentage of its larva find a nice home in the gills of the nearby fish. The small-shell trait is selectively passed along to subsequent generations.

3. A small-shelled mussel is born that has a little black pigment on its protruding lure. The pigment makes the lure even more interesting to the fish. Subsequent generations find even more success with adaptations that make the pigment in a pattern that mimics a minnow, and that allow them to twitch the lure. Other adaptations that don't attract fish are not selected for higher success, and vanish from the population.

4. Over time, fish-luring mussels that release larvae when fish are close by have more success than those that don't. Specifically, mussels that are stimulated to release larvae when thier lure is tugged do the best. Eventually, the entire population gains the ability to suddenly shoot larvae the instant a fish touches it.

I'd also like to comment that the guy in that mussel video sounded like a complete dolt when he was asking how the mussel could possibly "know" what pattern to make its lure. This is idiotic. Of course the mussel doesn't know. It doesn't even know that it's supposed to be impersonating a minnow. It just does what works, and it's had hundreds of millions of years to figure out just what that is. 

I blasted this apart in the other thread. Why do you continue to make ignorant claims when you know this to be true?

to generate new creative domains for the creation of new phenotypes for organisms, we turn to the following.

New information is gained by a mutatory mechanism that satisfies two requisites at once. The size of the genome in terms of bases grows, and the diversity of the genome grows. A special mutation known as duplicate error, where a spliceosome makes a mistake, and during mitosis a duplication ends up with the progenitor cell retaining an extra part of the genome. This new part is redundant, and thus free to mutate based on random frequency. This mechanism is critical to evolution, and produces two genetic flows without which evolution would not be possible. These are paralogs and orthologs. Across the vast diversity of life, the majority of genes share a near-identical similarity to another, with a very similiar job. These are grouped together in large gene families. All the gene families have a lineage that stretches back four billion years.

On this subject, in an article not displayed here, this is what I wrote:

DNA genomes are extremely redundant. 91% of the human genome is redundant, if you are interested. So changing one copy will add new information. Because most of the time the polymerization works out fine. Imagine it like a library. There is only one copy of each book. You remove one book and replace it with a different, new book. Are you adding information? No. You are changing information. This is the crux of the creationist argument. But imagine you have twelve copies of each book. You replace one copy of one book with a different, new book. Now you are adding new information because the pre-existing information is still there in the form of 11 other books.

Evolution is dependent on homologous sets of genes called orthologs and paralogs. Genes in multiple organisms that obviously descended from the same common ancestor (anyone who bothers should check the amino acid tracking branching tree of hemoglobin evolution as an example) are called orthologs, while genes which occurred as the result of mutation descended from a single gene (thereby producing two or more new genes) are called paralogs. Both of these are called homologs.

It is about duplicative mutations, followed by recombinative mutations, or shuffling mutations. For instance, A protein is not subdivided merely by it’s amino acid. It is grouped into large subunits called polypeptides, regional stretches of protein subunit roughly 100 amino acids long. In this way we can see that massive proteins (>1000 amino acids) are not only defined by their individual, but ultimately, the order of different units created by smaller strings of amino acids within the complex. The protein transforms into it’s secondary structure by folding at the kinks between the subunits. The shape, therefore, of a protein is directly determined by it’s chemical sequence. The folding becomes further intricate during progression to tertiary structure when the folds between individual units take shape. Finally, the protein reaches it’s quaternary structure or it’s native state, with the intricate system of folds.

Many people say that mutations are always destructive or deletrious, or "remove information" or that DNA repair blocks mutation. Nonsense. I've studied DNA repair for a large portion of my career, and I assure you that it is not a limiting factor. THe enzymatic lockstep (it is controlled by ribosomal machines at the site of transcription) is operated on a feedback loop that only detects harmful mutations. Like I said, evolution is mostly about recombinative and shuffling and duplication mutations. DNA repair is a system to fix point mutations, which are mostly harmful, and when harmful, the enzymatic response performs , BER, MMR or NER (Base-excision, Nucleotide excision or mismatch repair) to correct the nucleotide incorrect arrangement (as it will be detected by the ribosomal transcription checkers). This is why nearly all divergences are preceded by duplication (homology)

Repair is designed to respond to two things

-Point mutations that are interrupting the transcription (these are sometimes called Stop codons or nonsense mutations)

-A physical break in the DNA strand

Not the evolution mutation mechanisms, which are recombination, homology, duplication and shuffling. Point mutations are damaging, as they create stop codons, or nonsense mutations, but as we shall soon see, bearing in mind the organization of the proteome, point mutations have little to do with evolutionary mechanisms

there is almost nothing original in the vertebrae genome. It is the result of multiple whole-global duplications throughout evolution. Even in humans, the proteome contains only 7% vertebrae-specific proteins. The only place we really seem to have any originality is in domain shuffling (Im pretty sure that the human tyrpsin can bind to at least 18 domains, while in drosophilia it's only 5). As I said about protein structure, much of the innovation merely comes from rearrangement of subunits, which is beneficial in terms of the shuffling mutation quite often.

An excellent example of how evolutionary mechanisms can create novel protein combinations which can give survival benefits to the carrier organisms is found in a pair of the most critical classes of proteins in the whole of life: Kinases and phosphotases. I would go through exactly what these do, but that will take hours, so instead I will just explain it in short summary, which will sound like jargon, so here goes:

Kinases are protein phosphorylating class of signal transductors which control a large amount of proteins and amplify many, many signals, also acting as signal-integrating proteins by anchoring to the extracellular matrix junction and relaying signals from the membrane to the Endoplasmic reticulum and the nucleus. Instead of a ligand reciprocal/cooperative Allosteric binding site to control the action of the protein in question, a certain side chain (always a threonine, serine or tyrosine) is phosphorylated, which activates or deactivates the protein. The cyclic nature of kinase loop functions is very similar to that of GTPases. The largest superfamily of kinase is a simple monodomainal kinase called the Ras protein. As evolutionary mechanisms took course and organisms became more complex, a wider range of transductors became required, which evolve in lockstep with other evolving functions, a process called coevolution. This has been indicated by the fact that the Ras like domain has since become integrated into totally different proteins, and created entire classes of kinases simply by joining the Ras to many other domains throughout the course of evolution to create novel protein combinations. The branching of various kinase families that results from this is fully consistent with molecular clock tracking of the divergence rate of the amino acids (recall noise mutations). Which means whole families of kinases have been generated at different times in the evolutionary process by duplication and divergence. We now have many, many families of kinases including Cdc7, PDGF receptors, TGF-Beta receptors, Ca2+ dependent kinase, CdK integrators (which include a large range of Cdk including Cdk2 and Cdk3), Src kinases, KSS1, the list goes on and on.

This is just a small example of how evolutionary mechanisms can generate huge numbers of novel proteins simply by recombination and duplication. The lack of originality or "design" in the kinase family, as well as the prescence of Ras in every kinase and the underlying signature sequence is clear evidence for a primordial kinase upon which the whole family was built, simply by the course of time and natural selection.

Perhaps you were confused when I shot down your previous comment? The analogy I use is glucose oxidation, which is a stepwise process of electron transfer, not one of which involves adding oxygen (as that would set it on fire). Same thing here really, genetic divergence is slow, so if we have a simple (not anagenesis) example of population X and population Y of an organism, and population Y is geograhically seperated from X, and thusly pursues a different path of divergence, which is to say that what constitutes a genetic advantage changes. As homologies proliferate, as often does, Y becomes more genetically seperate from X (and X from Y as it diverges too). The divergence widens and phenotype becomes different, but it is still a worm, in terms of genetics. However, a speciative split comes when the divergence widens enough that they can no longer interbreed. This is not a noticeable event, because gene flow is a continuum process, but at a point in time, the divergence will widen enough that should X and Y meet again, they cannot exchange genetic material anymore. And that basic description is backed up by the fact that every stage can be tracked by genetic homology searches.

Read this and go away. And please read it this time:

http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/sapient/atheist_vs_theist/7918

Several million strains of bacteria would disagree with you.

Funny, I thought that's what your videos were guilty of.  Oh, and there is nothing imagnary about Dr Martin's lack of relevant academic credentials. 

 As for the rest of your repititous drivel, I believe deludedgod has explained why you are wrong.

Shoo:you have nothing new to add. 

omg using wikipedia as a source is a crime. How about use a link to a book to read.

Evolution, does not only appear over vast periods, but you can see its mark "and its effect" in modern times.

In Europe, people exposed to many diseases, over a long period, became immune to many of them.

Yes, many people died from them, but the ones that survived, had developed immunity to illnesses in their environment...(evolution)

Once they (Europeans) traveled to a closed environment, where there was no exposure to said diseases...(like Hawaii where these adaptations where not needed.)  a large segment of the population died.

Yes, these adaptations where small, but it is still documented proof of evolution.

To the theists, who say why isn't evolution happening today?

I say it is, but its very suttle, and over time becomes gradually pronounced. (like whales that on rare occasion are born with vestiges of hind limbs.) a kinda evolutionary throwback, if you will.

Its hard to get a feel for evolutionary time - I heard a nice example:

If the rate at which the elephant evolved in size from a rat sized ancestor (its direct ancestor was of that size) was slow enough that we could not see the difference over our lifetime, it still would only need about 10000 generations, which is a short time geologically.

A small elephant having distant progeny that are big elephants is still an unevolved elephant. Most size changes depend on climate and diet. And it will not take 10,000 generations, only a few are required for this change in body size. The average height of male humans just two hundred years ago was about 5 feet. Today it appears to be rising above 6'. This change is due to change in diet.

Evolution is a Theory that claims all living creature body types known to us today evolved from one self replicating creature that by some great miracle must have come inti existence bilions of years ago. So Elephants having larger sized offsrping that are Elephants is zero evolution. Diet changes have increased size and a certain protein introduced into a grazing horses diet causes the horse teeth to change from grazing type to browsing type. This is not evolution in action because all the information required for these transformations are already present in the genome.

Darwin's mistake was that he thought evolution can occur through a process called pangenes. A 'pangene' is a mythical particle that was suppose to be shed from every part of an organisms body and moved to the gonads and accumulate in 'germ cells' and are then transferred to the offspring.

We ought to be celebrating Mendel's birthday, The Father of the Science of Genetics, for he discovered how genetic characteristics are actually tranfered from parents to offspring. Mendellian Genetics dealt a deathblow to Darwinian evolution. In fact, the co-founder of Darwinian evolution, Alfed Russel Wallace, was fully aware that this was so and he opposed Mendellian Genetics, claiming that if accepted, Medellian Genetics restores the fixity of the species because it explains all observed variations of each type of creature as merely subsets of a very rich inital genetic code. Thus the wolf, the Great Dane, and the gene starved Chiuaua are the same species and represent zero evolution.

For Evolution to be true, evolutionary scientists must demonstrate that there are known series of random mutations to the genetic that have a reasonable chance altering the original genetic code to add new Genetic alter the information content of the inital genetic code to account for the development of body parts that will produce new biological parts, structures and systems that did not exist in the distant ancestor. In order to not violate the 2nd Law of thermodynomics, each step leading to each major transformation must flow from molecular configurations of low levels of probability to ever increasing probabilities of the necessary molecular configurations to bring about the physical transformation.

Science has spoken on this critical issue for Evolution. Science says NO to Evolution. This is also true for abiogenesis. The most scientific one can make with respect to life is that: 'In the begging, God created.' For it takes intelligence to put boundary conditions on the laws of Physics and probability to bring arrange molecules from high probability states to the extremely low probabllity states of living creatures as well as the molecular design required for the first selfreplicating life form. Billions of years does not help because, in the absence of Intelligent Designer, organized functional systems will continually break down (decay) over time. 

This we see among all living creatures. If we are kept safe from all predators and diseases, we will eventully die due to mutations that continually occur in our body throughout our life.