Mr. Speaker, I've always been interested in origins. Even though my training is in the law and in history, it has ever been an application of mind to contemplate and to study the origins of man and of life here on earth and many theories of origins have been propounded throughout our nation's history.

1859, a sincere biologist returned from the Galapagos Islands and wrote a book entitled "The Origins of Species", in which he did then Charles Darwin offered a theory of the origin of species which we've come to know as evolution. 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.

1925, in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, this theory made its way through litigation into the classrooms of America and we all have seen the consequence over the last seventy seven years. Evolution not taught as a sincere theory of biologists but rather, Mr. Speaker, taught as fact. Unless anyone listening in can doubt that, we can all see in our mind’s eye that grade room classroom we all grew up in with the linear depiction of evolution just above the chalkboard. There's the little monkey crawling on the grass, there's the Neanderthal with his knuckles dragging and then there's Mel Gibson standing in all of his glory. It is what we have been taught that man proceeded and evolved along linear lines.

But now comes a new find by paleontologists in the newspapers all across America, a new study in Nature magazine. 6 to 7 million year old skull has been unearthed - the Toumaï skull - and it's suggested human evolution was actually, according to a new theory, human evolution was taking place, and I'm quoting now, "all across Africa and on the Earth" and the Earth was once truly, and I quote, “a planet of the apes” on which nature was experimenting with many human-like creatures. Paleontologists are excited about this, Mr. Speaker, but no one's pointing out that the textbooks, I guess, will need to be changed because the old theory of evolution taught for seventy-seven years in the classrooms of America as fact is suddenly replaced by a new theory or, I hasten to add, I'm sure will be told a new fact. The truth is it always was a theory, Mr. Speaker.

And now that we've recognized evolution as a theory, I would simply and humbly ask that can we teach it as such and can we also consider teaching other theories of the origin of species, like the theory that was believed in by every signer of the Declaration of Independence. Every signer of the Declaration of Independence believed that men and women were created and were endowed by that same creator with certain unalienable rights.

The Bible tells us that God created man in his own image, male and female he created them and I believe that, Mr. Speaker, I believe that God created the known universe the earth and everything in it, including man, and I also believe that someday, scientists will come to see that only the theory of intelligent design provides even a remotely rational explanation for the known universe. But until that day comes, and I have no fear of science I believe that the more we study the science the more the truth of faith will become apparent, I just would 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 and an interesting theory to boot. But let's also bring into the minds of all of our children all of the theories about the unknowable that some bright day in the future through science and perhaps through faith, we will find the truth from whence we come and I yield back.