A few days ago we brought you a Fact Checker story about California Governor Jerry Brown’s claim that Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence does not believe evolution is true.
In his speech at the Democratic National Convention, Governor Brown said:
“Trump says global warming is a hoax. I say Trump is a fraud. Trump says there’s no drought in California. I say Trump lies. So, it’s not surprising that Trump chose as his running mate a man who denies that there’s such a thing as evolution.”
PolitiFact took up the challenge to confirm Brown’s claim and after some back and forth with readers, determined the claim to be “half true.”
Having quite a bit of experience with science deniers of all walks of life, I held that the claim was completely true. Alas, video of then Congressman Mike Pence in 2002, confirmed my suspicion.
In the video, Pence claimed to have held a longstanding interest in paleoanthropology:
“I have always been interested in origins. Even though my training is in the law and in history, it has ever been an avocation of mine to contemplate and to study the origins of man and of life here on Earth.”
And it pretty much goes downhill from there.
Pence continued his scientifically illiterate address to Congress by confusing the word “theory” in conversation with the word “theory” in science.
“Charles Darwin never thought of evolution as anything other than a theory. He hoped that someday it would be proven by the fossil record but did not live to see that, nor have we.”
And with that, Pence dismissed the foundational theory of modern biology.
He continued:
“The truth is it always was a theory, Mr. Speaker. And now that we have recognized evolution as a theory, I would simply and humbly ask, can we teach it as such and can we also consider teaching other theories of the origin of species?”
With this statement in Pence’s concluding paragraph, we can confirm that he does in fact not believe in the theory of evolution:
“I would just humbly ask as new theories of evolution find their ways into the newspapers and into the textbooks, let us demand that educators around America teach evolution not as fact, but as theory.”
Someone please tell Mike Pence that a theory in science is built on a foundation of facts.
Watch Pence’s speech here:
