Richard Leakey

From Philosopedia

Richard Erskine Frere Leakey (19 December 1944– )

Human evolution centered in East Africa, not Asia, the Leakey family of anthropologists and archaeologists has concluded.

In 1931 Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey(1903–1972) began excavating at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. With his wife, Mary Leakey (1913–1996), he discovered Zinjanthropus (1959; now regarded as Australopithecine), which has been dated at 1.75 million years of age, and Homo habilis (1961). Mary Leakey then discovered Homo fossils over 3.75 million years old.

Their son, Richard, discovered another type of hominid skull, which he and Roger Lewin described in Origins (1979). In 1993 Richard, who lost the bottom portion of his legs in a plane crash, was ousted as head of Kenya’s wildlife service. In 1995 he was one of the founders of an opposition party with the aim of “cleaning up” Kenya. The Kenyan president accused him of being a white racist colonialist with foreign ties.

In 1996, he entered wholeheartedly into politics, running as a candidate for the presidency. With Lewin, Leakey wrote Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (1993), which holds that man was not created nor did he evolve by some grand design. Slight changes in climate, disasters from the sky, geological shifts: too many complexities exist for any god or gods to have arranged or even to have wanted to arrange. “I am not religious,” Leakey wrote, “at least not in the formal sense.

As a schoolboy I adopted a kind of personal atheism and was much ridiculed because my uncle was Archbishop of East Africa at the time. There developed a campaign to ‘save’ me, to which I reacted by being even more adamantly atheistic. I came to be critical of formal religion, particularly of the damage that missionaries were doing to the culture of the people of Kenya. I have no difficulty in accepting the notion that standards of ethics and morality could be derived in the absence of religion. And I now believe that such standards are an inevitable - and predictable - product of human evolution; altruism is part of the behavioral repertoire of social animals, so it can be expected to develop much further in intelligent and intensely social animals, like our human ancestors. This is the humanists’ position.”

In One Life (1983), he wrote, “I do not believe in a god who has or had a human form and to whom I owe an existence. I believe it is man who created God in his image and not the other way around; also, I see no reason to believe in life after death.”

In 1995, Richard Leakey became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association. He is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists, and he signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.

Of his outlook, Leakey has written,

• I am deeply influenced by what I see as the hypocrisy and negative influence of religion in people’s lives and although I do see the positive contributions that the institutions of religion have made in the development of society, I am unashamedly irreligious myself. My paternal grand parents were CMS missionaries to East Africa and two of their four children married into church families. My father, as a successful human paleontologist, was curiously ambivalent and, although he refused to have any of his children christened, he seemed to have a strong Christian sympathy. My mother, raised as a Catholic, had no time for religion of any kind and left her children in no doubt about her views. My own career has developed in Kenya where I have had modest success in my own work on human ancestry. I was fortunate to locate an important fossil site on the shores of Lake Turkana in 1968 and I spent a good number of years leading successful field expeditions. In 1989, I changed careers and became engaged in revamping Kenya’s wildlife conservation programme. This work was a chance to gain insight into how corruption and greed in public institutions in Kenya was pulling the country to its knees and, without exception, the real villains were regular church-going Christians and prominent persons in the mosque. The ease with which people seem to pass on responsibility for their own failures and incompetence to their god is surely a handicap to progress. In Kenya, God’s will is a frequent excuse and explanation for disasters that are simply the result of poor management, negligence, and professional incompetence. It seems to me that a rationalist approach which stresses personal responsibility in all actions would bring better results. Although I see religion as one of the greatest frauds, it is obvious that most people do need something that humanists can do without. We are a minority and perhaps we always will be. This we need to accommodate, especially where we are in public life where co-operation with various institutions seems to be essential for social if not socio-economic progress. Surely free thought and free speech is what we expect and so we must accept it too.