In your earlier post, you said that you had no idea what natural selection would cause over three billion years. Is Dawkins saying that he could make such a prediction? If you mean the previous three billion years, we can just see what happened.

what we who do contracting would call a "money black hole"

FTFY

I also know how natural selection affects fitness over time in naive simulations, sometimes I get continuous improvement in fitness with no end in sight and sometimes it stops with no chance of improvement in fitness.

Would evolutionists claim that improvement is continuous? Also, what constitutes an improvement depends on the background environment as well as other organisms. Nature may select for local improvements, but changes in background conditions may render such changes to be nonimprovements.

I'm honest enough to say that I have no idea what natural selection would cause over 3 billion years on this earth. Maybe you should admit that you do not know either.

I don't recall claiming to know. Indeed, do people such as Dawkins claim to know?

Natural selection is not so much a theory but a recognition of mortality and its correlation (however weak) with genetics.

Are you admitting that natural selection occurs?

You can only assume it causes exactly what we can observe and then claim that as evidence. Unfortunately, that does not make any sense.

It is not the particular outcomes that count as evidence of natural selection, but mortality and the correlation between mortality and genetic makeup..

So something like this is the natural result of NCLB where the 15th to 50th percentiles get 80% of the focus, and the top 50% get no attention, unless they drop, and the bottom 15% are exempted from the rules (special needs).

Where did the other 20% of the focus go?

But how extensible are the methods shown? Would they work with larger numbers? Would they work for adding seven numbers?

Also, I have issues with the claim that addition shouldn't be algorithmic.

"number sentences" versus "equation"

Are all number sentences equations? What about "7 is a prime number."?

Is making tens easier than carrying?

There may be large blind spots in parents' understanding of the commutative and associative properties of addition, but these examples aren't helping. For the commutative property, use an example. We are to pay $15 for an item using a $5 bill and a $10 bill. Does it matter whether we first hand over the $5 bill and then the $10 bill or first hand over the $10 bill and then the $5 bill? For the associative property, use three bills paperclipped together in the different ways..

Average isn't a synonym for mean

Microsoft Excel begs to differ.

Prehistoric history is kind of a contradiction in terms, isn't it? It also isn't scientific, not being amenable to experiment.

If history means the study of written records, then yes. But it is amenable to observation.

At any rate, Darwin's work is pretty much deductive

I took Origin of Species to be inductive.

How would you study such beliefs? The beliefs are real, if not their objects.

Feel free to provide limits as to how far natural selection can go.

Anything can be at the center of the universe, but our solar system isn't close to being at the center of our galaxy.

It doesn't happen around us because the conditions aren't right. For one thing, it may have happened under very different atmospheric conditions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

For one, there is this big, burning ball of gas just 93 million miles away from us.

So that's what happened to Fred Phelps.

I'm hoping he'll write up a similar series for Bruno. If "Cosmos" mentions Bruno they should also mention Deepak Chopra, since he has as much to do with modern astronomy as Bruno did in the late 1500s, i.e., not much.

Funny, modern scientists don't advocate burning Chopra at the stake. So why did the Church burn Bruno?