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 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 ...."
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."
