4 Quotes & Sayings By Richard E Leakey

Richard E. Leakey is a paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and activist. He founded the Richard Leakey Foundation with his wife and fellow anthropologist, Mary Leakey, in order to promote the study and understanding of human evolution and early hominid evolution. The foundation's work includes environmental protection and preservation of natural resources; conservation of endangered species; and the promotion of human rights Read more

Richard Leakey was born in 1934.

1
I simply would not accede to being forced into this, and would frequently be kept out of classes because of irreverent comments and mocking this religious stuff. Frankly, it stayed with me to this day. In fact, don't get me going. I'm almost as bad as Richard Dawkins on this issue. Richard E. Leakey
2
An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet's four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a biological accident, the product of countless propitious circumstances. As we peer back through the fossil record, through layer upon layer of long-extinct species, many of which thrived far longer than the human species is ever likely to do, we are reminded of our mortality as a species. There is no law that declares the human animal to be different, as seen in this broad biological perspective, from any other animal. There is no law that declares the human species to be immortal. Richard E. Leakey
3
For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and so creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains of hunter-gatherers in our heads, looking out on a modern world made comfortable for some by the fruits of human inventiveness, and made miserable for others by the scandal of deprivation in the midst of plenty. Richard E. Leakey