"Until I see stronger evidence, I will continue to believe that climate change is primarily driven by solar phenomena and that it is normal for the earth to pass through major cooling and warming phases."

Exactly what evidence have you seen, Camille? Have you read, cover to cover, the IPCC report and most of the studies it cites, as I have? Have you the necessary contextual information and background to evaluate the science?

Until and unless you do, those of us who've done our homework are gonna tell you and every other self-anointed "global warming skeptic" to cram it. So cram it. That's right, shut up. I make absolutely no apology for telling you that your opinion is worthless. Science isn't a democracy - it's an infocracy, where information rules, so either bone up or accept your peonage.

Don...whatever his last name is...says the following:

"Evolution has a status that it simply doesn't deserve. People say it's vital to understanding biology. But it's genetics that's the foundation for biology"

Evolution is the change in allele frequencies over time. Evolution is merely the study of how ecological relationships affect the probability of an allele's expression in a population. They're the same damn thing. To say that genetics can be studied without an evolutionary perspective is like saying that medicine can be practiced without a medical history. It's like saying a car can be designed without any attention to crash standards or federal regs.

Proving my point, once again, that most deniers - of climate change, of evolution, of whatever - tend not to understand that which they're criticizing.

I really don't get what the problem is with allowing kids to question the results.

-- NiteRider0311

The problem is that just about any argument can be made to sound reasonable and convincing to somebody not educated enough to see flaws in logic, reasoning, or cited evidence. By definition, a textbook has to boil things down to its simplest level. At that level, the flawed arguments of creationists would sound just as compelling as the arguments posed by science. A 12 year old can't be expected to wade through an entire field to decide which one's arguments are better.

I mean I'm an agnostic, trying not to take sides and it seems to me neither side has the ultimate proof, show me.

-- NiteRider0311

Not taking a side isn't intellectually courageous, it's waffling. The major difference between the sides is that one presents claims that can be tested and the other doesn't. At some crucial point, creationism invokes a creator whose presence we can't verify, whose actions are not clearly its actions, whose presence can only be inferred and guessed at. Evolutionary theory only claims that environmental pressures change which alleles (patterns of gene expression) are most common in the population throughout time. Simple, transparent, and testable.