Louise Leakey Quotes

People are still very uncomfortable with the idea that humans are not specially created species. I believe we are a fantastic species. But we are not created specially. That's very hard for people to accept in their day-to-day routine.

Every creature that lives climbs up its own genealogical tree before it reaches its mature condition. All animals living, or that ever have lived, are united together by blood relationship of varying nearness or remoteness, and every animal now in existence has a pedigree stretching back, not merely for ten or a hundred generations, but through all geologic time since life first commenced on the earth.

The question now at issue, whether the living species are connected with the extinct by a common bond of descent, will best be cleared up by devoting ourselves to the study of the actual state of the living world, and to those monuments of the past in which the relics of the animate creation of former ages are best preserved and least mutilated by the hand of time.

For the source of any characteristic so widespread and uniform as this adaptation to environment we must go back to the very beginning of the human race.

If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry - yours and mine - back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet.

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

Evolution isn't just a take-it-or-leave-it story about where we came from. It's an epic at the centre of life itself. It tells us we are part of nature in every respect.

And, you know, the fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor, and we all have a common ancestry with the plant in the lobby. This is what evolution tells us. And, it's true. It's kind of unbelievable.

As you know, the fossil record includes not only the ancestors of crocodiles and whales, but also the ancestors of human beings. And this, of course, is why evolution remains controversial.

I first became aware of Charles Darwin and evolution while still a schoolboy growing up in Chicago. My father and I had a passion for bird-watching, and when the snow or the rain kept me indoors, I read his bird books and learned about evolution.

If you go far enough back, your genome connects you with bacteria, butterflies, and barracuda - the great chain of being linked together through DNA.

So close is life to life. The universality of the deep chemistry of living things is indeed a fantastic and beautiful thing. And all the time we human beings have been too proud to recognize our kinship with the animals.

Many people, whether religious believers or not, were repelled by the idea that we humans are nothing more special than a species of mammal directly descended from the higher primates, and that we achieved that status by winning a long struggle, shockingly red, as Tennyson famously put it, “in tooth and claw

The facts of evolution are clear and are not disputed by any serious scientific worker. The universe is over 11 billion years old, and the earth, in particular, is over 4 billion. That is a fact. Life on earth is at least 2.5 billion years old, and, as new evidence accumulates, the best estimate of the origin of life gets pushed further and further into the past. That too is fact. It is also a fact that there were no mammals or birds 200 million years ago and no vertebrates 600 million years ago, while there are no dinosaurs now. Finally, it is a fact that under con- ditions that have existed on earth for the last billion years, at least, all living organisms arise from previously living organisms. So, the present complex living forms have evolved by an unbroken and continuous process from the simplest living forms of the pre-Cambrian era. To as- sert, on the contrary, that the earth and life on it are a paltry ten or hundred thousand years old and that the complex forms living today arose in an instant from unorganized matter is in contradiction not simply with the corpus of biological knowledge but with all scientific knowl- edge of the physical world. To deny evolution is to deny physics, chemistry, and astronomy, as well as biology

Evolution is the idea some people have to explain life without God.

Then, of course, through the umbilical link we all tumble backwards down the spiralling DNA staircase to one common ancestor in Africa, and before that some bunch of curious monkeys. Down and down we go unto the sea, unto the dust, the single cellular dust. What impulse drove one cell to become two? What yearning pulled the fish on to the land? What caused apes to walk upright? Some invisible magnetic pull. Is there a difference between attraction and intention? Where is evolution taking us?

Despite some remaining puzzles, there's no reason to doubt that Darwin had this point right, that all creatures on earth are biological relatives

Most organisms either adapt and become part of the system, or get wiped out. The only thing we have to adapt to the system with is our brain. If we don't use it, and we don't adapt fast enough, we won't survive.

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.

Nor do I think we came from monkeys, by the wayThat's another piece of garbage. What the hell's it based on? We couldn't've come from anything-fish, maybe, but not monkeys. I don't believe in the evolution of fish to monkeys to men. Why aren't monkeys changing into men now? It's absolute garbage. It's absolutely irrational garbage, as mad as the ones who believe the world was made only four thousand years ago, the fundamentalists.

Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology.

I'll admit that the discovery of evolution is humbling, but it is also empowering. It transforms our relationship to the life around us. Instead of being outsiders watching the natural world go by, we are insiders. We are part of the process; we are the exquisite result of billions of years of natural research and development.

Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from and where we are going.

The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. The key to our being here now is time, 4.54 billion (Earth) years of time. Nuclear fission wasn't discovered until long after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace published their original books and papers, for example. Our ability to measure atomic masses wasn't developed until long after their deaths. These features of nature enabled us to reckon the age of the Earth and compare it with speciation rates here.