Leakey insists he has no animosity toward religion.
"If you tell me, well, people really need a faith ... I understand
that," he said.
"I see no reason why you shouldn't go through your life thinking if
you're a good citizen, you'll get a better future in the afterlife
...."
NEW YORK (AP) — Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will
soon be history.
Not that the avowed atheist has any doubts himself.
Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born
paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have
accelerated to the point that "even the skeptics can accept it."
"If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the
evidence, that it's solid, that we are all African, that color is
superficial, that stages of development of culture are all
interactive," Leakey says, "then I think we have a chance of a world
that will respond better to global challenges."
Leakey, a professor at Stony Brook University on Long Island, recently
spent several weeks in New York promoting the Turkana Basin Institute
in Kenya. The institute, where Leakey spends most of his time,
welcomes researchers and scientists from around the world dedicated to
unearthing the origins of mankind in an area rich with fossils.
His friend, Paul Simon, performed at a May 2 fundraiser for the
institute in Manhattan that collected more than $2 million. A National
Geographic documentary on his work at Turkana aired this month on
public television.
Now 67, Leakey is the son of the late Louis and Mary Leakey and
conducts research with his wife, Meave, and daughter, Louise. The
family claims to have unearthed "much of the existing fossil evidence
for human evolution."
On the eve of his return to Africa earlier this week, Leakey spoke to
The Associated Press in New York City about the past and the future.
"If you look back, the thing that strikes you, if you've got any
sensitivity, is that extinction is the most common phenomena," Leakey
says. "Extinction is always driven by environmental change.
Environmental change is always driven by climate change. Man
accelerated, if not created, planet change phenomena; I think we have
to recognize that the future is by no means a very rosy one."
Any hope for mankind's future, he insists, rests on accepting existing
scientific evidence of its past.
"If we're spreading out across the world from centers like Europe and
America that evolution is nonsense and science is nonsense, how do you
combat new pathogens, how do you combat new strains of disease that
are evolving in the environment?" he asked.
"If you don't like the word evolution, I don't care what you call it,
but life has changed. You can lay out all the fossils that have been
collected and establish lineages that even a fool could work up. So
the question is why, how does this happen? It's not covered by
Genesis. There's no explanation for this change going back 500 million
years in any book I've read from the lips of any God."
Leakey began his work searching for fossils in the mid-1960s. His team
unearthed a nearly complete 1.6-million-year-old skeleton in 1984 that
became known as "Turkana Boy," the first known early human with long
legs, short arms and a tall stature.
In the late 1980s, Leakey began a career in government service in
Kenya, heading the Kenya Wildlife Service. He led the quest to protect
elephants from poachers who were killing the animals at an alarming
rate in order to harvest their valuable ivory tusks. He gathered 12
tons of confiscated ivory in Nairobi National Park and set it afire in
a 1989 demonstration that attracted worldwide headlines.
In 1993, Leakey crashed a small propeller-driven plane; his lower legs
were later amputated and he now gets around on artificial limbs. There
were suspicions the plane had been sabotaged by his political enemies,
but it was never proven.
About a decade ago, he visited Stony Brook University on eastern Long
Island, a part of the State University of New York, as a guest
lecturer. Then-President Shirley Strum Kenny began lobbying Leakey to
join the faculty. It was a process that took about two years; he
relented after returning to the campus to accept an honorary degree.
Kenny convinced him that he could remain in Kenya most of the time,
where Stony Brook anthropology students could visit and learn about
his work. And the college founded in 1957 would benefit from the
gravitas of such a noted professor on its faculty.
"It was much easier to work with a new university that didn't have a
200-year-old image where it was so set in its ways like some of the
Ivy League schools that you couldn't really change what they did and
what they thought," he said
Earlier this month, Paul Simon performed at a benefit dinner for the
Turkana Basin Institute. IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond and his wife, Peggy
Bonapace Gelfond, and billionaire hedge fund investor Jim Simons and
his wife, Marilyn, were among those attending the exclusive show in
Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.
Simon agreed to allow his music to be performed on the National
Geographic documentary airing on PBS and donated an autographed guitar
at the fundraiser that sold for nearly $20,000.
Leakey, who clearly cherishes investigating the past, is less
optimistic about the future.
"We may be on the cusp of some very real disasters that have nothing
to do with whether the elephant survives, or a cheetah survives, but
if we survive."
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