Famed Scientist Predicts: Evolution Will Soon Be Accepted By Everyone

[Playinghardball]

NEW YORK (The Blaze/AP) — Faithful beware. Famed scientist Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history. Despite continued controversy surrounding the debate over life’s origins, the avowed atheist sees a light at the end of the tunnel.

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.

More at: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/famed-scientist-predicts-evolution-will-soon-be-accepted-by-everyone/

[Politicalboi]

1. He can't mean here

When half the population is for a candidate who doesn't believe in evolution I think it will still take century or 2 for this country to accept it. As long as there are Repukes, and churches, evolution will not be accepted 100%

[mr blur]

2. Well -

[Ron Obvious]

3. I wish...

I'm afraid Leaky is naive here. Back in the 70's, before moving to the US, I had never knowingly met an evolution denier before. I didn't even know they existed. Then, going to university in Texas, I found out even several of my physics professors were creationists.
Intelligent, educated men, but still creationists because they were brought up Christian.

If we were all to base our beliefs on evidence, rather than base our evidence on our beliefs, I think this would be a better world.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

4. He is more optimistic than Einstein: "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity

and I'm not sure about the former."

[Thats my opinion]

5. I certainly hope Leakey is correct.

Many of us in the religious world work hard to help so many evangelicals understand that evolution is valid, and that it ought to be celebrated in every religious institution in the nation--and beyond.

A clergy project has on its affirming list hundred of ministers who are celebrating the evolutionary theory. Once Sunday a year is set aside as Evolution Sunday.

[Ron Obvious]

7. May I ask you...

I apologise in advance if my thinking is too black and white, but may I ask you, a Christian, whether you believe in a "fall of man", and an original sin? If not, do you still believe that Jesus was sent to remedy this? If not, what was the point of Jesus' sacrifice?

I'm not trying to start an argument here. I'm genuinely curious how evolution-believing Christians reconcile these concepts.

[rug]

6. Well, this would be the proof of evolution, wouldn't it?

[madrchsod]

8. nope!

leakey is a very optimistic man.

[Fumesucker]

9. Naive scientist is naive... n/t

[trotsky]

10. Commendable optimism.

But there will ALWAYS be people who reject evolution.

There are still people who cling to the flat earth theory, and people who reject germ theory, despite monumental volumes of undeniable evidence.

This is what religion lets you do - reject whatever facts you want in favor of what you want to be true. And as has been repeatedly stated in this very forum, it is very impolite to tell people their religious beliefs are wrong.

[laconicsax]

12. The director of the NIH rejects evolution.

"God-guided" evolution is a wholesale rejection of natural selection. Natural selection holds that natural factors result in some traits providing an immediate advantage and that advantage leads to the proliferation of those traits through the genome.

Claiming that a god guides that process directly contradicts the entirety of that:

-Natural factors no longer create the selective pressure.
-Traits aren't selected for their immediate benefits, but for their future usefulness.
-The proliferation of those traits is no longer results from an advantage they provide to the organism, but from the preference of an external entity.

[trotsky]

14. Ugh. n/t

[dmallind]

11. maybe he means soon in the evolutionary timescale

Where changes are introduced over hundreds and thousands of generations.

[trotsky]

13. LOL

Nice one.