A Christian evolutionary biologist, Leakey is remembered for saying, “Nothing I’ve ever found has contradicted the Bible. It’s people with their finite minds who misread the Bible” (quoted in chapter 3 of Virginia Morell, 1995, Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind’s Beginnings).
A passage from the last page of the fourth edition (1955) of Adam’s Ancestors: The Evolution of Man and His Culture by Louis Leakey is especially noteworthy as we begin the twenty-first century:
We know from the study of evolution that, again and again, various branches of animal stock have become over-specialized, and that over-specialization has led to their extinction. Present-day Homo sapiens is in many physical respects still very unspecialized− … But in one thing man, as we know him today, is over-specialized. His brain power is very over-specialized compared to the rest of his physical make-up, and it may well be that this over-specialization will lead, just as surely, to his extinction. … if we are to control our future, we must first understand the past better.