This hasn’t been a good couple of days for science in Canada. First, our Minister of Science said he didn’t believe in evolution. Then, after the firestorm that erupted over the minister’s remarks, he tried clarifying his statement but he only succeeded in making things worse.

When Gary Goodyear, Canada’s Minister of State for Science and Technology, said that he believed in evolution “because we’re always evolving” certainly opens the door that the minister is playing word games. He did not emphatically state he believed in the theory of evolution. To suspicious outsiders, it’s a parsing of words that appear to give me wiggle room.

Here’s the original article where Goodyear refuses to answer a basic question about evolution.

And here he is trying to “set the record straight”

Are you convinced?