Scientist: Evolution debate will soon be historyAt one point I was a casual fan of the Leakeys, as they were celebrated in the media with their finds. Much later I became skeptical as their finds were used as launch points for unsustainable, extrapolatory, inferential claims about the origins of humanity. Every few years new finds give rise to all new Just So Stories, as when "Ardi" replaced "Lucy" as the hot find, and "sex motivated erect posture" is one story. And perhaps the Dmanisi find cancels them all out.
"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.""
At any rate, science of story telling charges ahead unabated, with all new stories periodically.
2 comments:
"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, then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges."
Wow. Leakey goes straight from a few bones pulled out of the ground to World Peace and Harmony with all the logic and naïveté of a Miss America contestant.
"Because science."
And all the while real science is demonstrating that "color", far from being a "superficial" "social construct", is proving to be non-trivial. Not that a paleontologist would know anything about genetics.
f 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,
When I read things like this,it screams out racism.
Theory of Evolution says humans and non-human primates evolved from a common ancestor.Now all human races evolved from a common african ancestor.Thus the african negroid is the only unevolved of the human races.He's the "prototype".
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