Haven't watched the video, but I will say this just for fun: natural selection isn't evolution. Never was.
it is the elimination of traits incompatible with survival due to the dying off of genetic lines with those traits, not the development of new traits that enhance survival.
I'd say they go hand in hand though. By eliminating less desirable traits, that encourages the development of more desirable traits. A kind of refinement if you will.
But which animals are more likely to develop new traits? Those with desirable traits or those with the weaker undesirable traits? I think it would be the former, if the tendency is toward improvement and increased survivability...Not really. Nothing new is developed. The genetic lines that are left had the more desirable traits, otherwise they would have died out. The traits were always there. What we see is a higher proportion of animals with the desirable traits because their competition has died out. I would agree that the dying out of those animals with less desirable traits makes way for those with more desirable traits to thrive, but no new traits spring into existence.
Not really. Nothing new is developed. The genetic lines that are left had the more desirable traits, otherwise they would have died out. The traits were always there. What we see is a higher proportion of animals with the desirable traits because their competition has died out. I would agree that the dying out of those animals with less desirable traits makes way for those with more desirable traits to thrive, but no new traits spring into existence.
So just why can't this "classic example" of evolution evolve to build a house or drive a car?
This is adaption, not evolution...
This is exactly the topic that was covered in the video and that Darwin admitted was a gap in his theory. Darwin demonstrated how you could find variations within a species and how biological/evolutionary changes would favor certain variations over others. What Darwin acknowledged and what these scientists are pushing is that there was no current reasonable explanation for how life evolved from one species to another.
Darwin didn't have the tools and data available to fill in these gaps. These three are saying that using additional scientific techniques and data and the simple probabilities around genetic combinations, there is no reasonable way to believe the relatively few viable species in the huge universe of possible genetic combinations was by pure chance.
I don't know if it's this basic or not, but the obvious answer seems to be need. If something lives near a large body of water, and it's land based source of food is taken away, forcing it to go into the water to find food, it would seem that eventually that creature will develop traits that would be useful in the water.