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from Gainesville, Florida Live Live presents conversation from the University of Florida, a discussion of social, political, scientific and religious issues of the day. Your host is Dr Michael V. Gannon, professor of history and ethics, an assistant dean of the College of Liberal arts and Sciences at the University of Florida.

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Yeah, hello and welcome to another conversation. My guest for this conversation is Dr Gerald Loewenstein. Jerry. Welcome to conversation. Welcome to the University of Florida. Glad to be here. I want to say a little bit about you, if you don't mind. You are chairman of the Department of Nuclear Medicine at the Pacific Medical Center at San Francisco, professor of Clinical Medicine in the University of California.

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Your special academic interest or one of your many driving academic interests, is the study of man's origins through fossil proteins. You just returned from Africa, where you worked with Jane Goodall, who's worked with chimpanzees, is known internationally, and you yourself were tracking wild gorillas. Uh, you have, uh, an interest in a wide number of things, including evolution and creationism, and I believe you very recently had a debate with the Reverend Jerry Falwell on the Merv Griffin program.

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What was the issue between the two of you? The issue was, I guess, set by Mary Griffin in that I had been to a conference at the Vatican. Believe it or not, uh, there's something called the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of the Vatican, which is a high scientific body in the Catholic Church.

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And considerably to my surprise, they had a working group, as they call it, on the subject of, ah, recent knowledge of primate primate evolution. And when I got the invitation, at first I thought it was a hoax. Uh, because you didn't realize that that problem had been fairly well resolved within the Roman Catholic community.

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That's right. While it was still an issue much controverted in the evangelical community, that's right. It made me realize that the whole issue of creationism and the rejection of evolution is a brilliant American fundamentalist phenomenon and not an international one. Yes, and what was the point that the Reverend Jerry Falwell was making on the program?

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His point was that he believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible, and he didn't he didn't bring up bring any evidence to that. I think he just welcomed the opportunity to be on the show and to talk about the moral majority. And he rather glanced over the whole issue of evolution when it was brought up and said, There are others associates of his who are more qualified than he scientists who are more qualified than he discussed the issue, but that he does believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible, which implies that the Earth and all its beings were created some five years ago and created exactly as we find them today.

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I believe that these holes and I would imagine that Jerry Falwell would support the view popularly called creationism. Namely that there is a scientific structure to the view that all things were created simultaneously in the form that they now have. Um, did you have an opportunity to respond to that from your particular point of view, which is evolutionary?

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Well, the response was really as conducted by Merv Griffin After Jerry Falwell had his say, he wheeled on me and said, Well, didn't you just go to a conference at the Vatican? And what do they have to say about it? So I gave a brief rundown on the Vatican conference, the purpose of which was to reconcile two points of view with an evolution.

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The traditional, I would say, based upon fossils and comparative anatomy and the new wave of evolution is which I represent, which is biochemical evolution, working at the molecular level and trying to reconstruct evolution from looking at how proteins and D n A and the basic genetic material works.

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So the new fields. So at the Vatican Pontifical Academy, you had about a dozen experts, molecular biologist, paleontologists, 12 wise men at the back as the as nature entitled the subject. And the purpose of the gathering was to try to reach a consensus on the question.

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Did man evolved from his, uh, is it proper to say simian ancestors? Yes, that's five million years ago or as far ago as 30 million years ago, right? That was the fundamental issues that that we took up. And what was the answer that you came up with?

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Perhaps I should sketch in a little bit of the background before giving the answer, because that's very interesting. Uh, traditionally, I would say, for the last generation, anthropologists have pretty much believed that there have been human beings of some kind around on Earth for the last 20 to 30 million years.

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Their main reason for believing this is a fossil species known as a fossil genus, I should say to be accurate. Called Rama Piturca's Ramp, it focuses a humanoid. The term humanoid means either a poor human it doesn't really define. Hominid is a term which means human.

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So the big issue is was romping focus. Hm annoyed or was the hominid? And remember, focus has been found as old as 14 million years and has been found in Africa, Asia and Europe. This has several implications. If Rompin focus were human, that means that there were human beings that long ago as long as 14 million years ago.

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And it means that there were in all the major continents, not just in Africa. Now, the molecular work that I alluded to comes to a different conclusion. The molecular work. If we compare the proteins of all the living apes and humans, we come to the conclusion that that we and the African apes, the chimps and gorillas that I was chasing after in Africa a couple of months ago, uh came from a common ancestor in Africa only five million years ago, so that the ancestry of man is much more recent than would be implied by the traditional Rama Piturca's view.

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So there's been a big fight, you know, one of these professional internecine fights going on for the last 10 or 15 years within anthropology between these two groups and a lot of evidence on both sides. But the major resistance to the molecular data has been from those who believe that Rama pit thickness was human.

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Now the evidence for that, in my opinion, being a molecular person, it's very, very weak because until very recently all they had found of Rompin focus with jaws and teeth. So all he could say was that the teeth of Rama Pacifica seemed to be more like those of living humans than of living apes.

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But we know many examples where teeth can be very misleading. On the basis of the teeth alone, they've reconstructed an image of Rama Piturca's is an upright walking human being and that famous time life parade where you see modern man marching along. And then behind him comes Neanderthal man kind of slumped over and behind him familiar with Homo erectus.

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Then near the end of the line, you have remote. Piturca's also walking up on two legs. Well, how can you tell from teeth whether something walks on two legs or not? So the fight has really been raging back and forth, and it was actually, it was actually attending a conference with my wife, who is an anthropologist, and hearing these people go at each other.

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That got me involved in doing research on this subject. And that's how I came to be invited to this and your wife took the notes on the conference. I understand and wrote the summary. That's right. My wife took the notes at the Vatican conference. She was not invited.

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She was sort of an outside woman who sort of came along with me. And but it turned out that she knew most of the people. There she is, the professional anthropologists, not I. Let's talk a bit about your molecular work. Um, you are tracing or attempting to trace man's origins through a study of proteins in fossils.

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Now, let's explain. First of all, what is a fossil? And then what is a protein? A fossil is an example of a dead species, usually quite old. A fossil could be 100 years old, but the kind that I'm talking about, the millions of years old skeletons that the fossil can be a skeleton.

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In some cases, a fossil can be a whole creature. For example, I've done research on frozen mammoths from Siberia. There you there you are lucky enough to have hair and skin and muscle and all those things to do your biochemical analysis on as well. But 99 9% of fossils consists only of skeletal material, bones and teeth and mostly teeth.

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Because teeth of the hardest parts, even things which will dissolve bone don't dissolve teeth. So a lot of fossils just consider consists of isolated teeth or jaws and teeth. Like Ronald Piturca's fossils I talked about, If you're lucky, you also get a few limb bones. In the case of humans, the critical part of the fossil is the pelvis, because the pelvis tells us whether this creature walked upright.

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The shape of the pelvis tells us whether the creature walked upright on two legs as we do, and that's the marked characteristic of the human line. We used to think that the characteristic of the human line is the big brain that we have such big brains compared to the apes that that first the big brain developed, and then the creature began walking on two legs.

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Now we know it's exactly the reverse from three and four million year old fossil fossils in Africa, we found a perfectly human pelvis. I shouldn't say perfectly because it's still slightly ape like but clearly a bipedal, upright walking individual with the brain no bigger than that of a chimp chimpanzee.

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Now, within the fossil structure, you find protein. What is protein proteins? Uh, well, I should give examples of proteins. Proteins are the things really, which make up most of the living creature in the case of bone. Part of that structure is calcium, just a mineral calcium.

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But the thing that holds the calcium together is proteins. The main protein and bone is one called college, and that's really college, and that holds us together. And collagen is also the main protein of of skin and proteins. Proteins. Proteins consists of 20 amino acids, which are like letters of the alphabet strung together, sometimes hundreds long, sometimes thousands long and obviously an infinite number of combinations.

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So a given protein like the college and I just mentioned will be very characteristic of a species, and we found that not only do creatures living creatures evolve, but individual proteins evolve. So, for example, the collagen of a human would be 99% are more identical to the collagen of an ape like a chimpanzee.

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Would you describe the proteins as once living material? Yes, which are now found in a what? A moribund state, non living state? Why did the proteins not disintegrate over time? Proteins do disintegrate over time, but some of them disintegrate very slowly, and the one that I've been particularly interested in college and disintegrate slowly because if you look at college and under the microscope, it looks like a little steel cables.

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Now, if you'd like to steal cable lying around, eventually it would rust. But it would take years, maybe hundreds of years, maybe even thousands of years, and that's what happens to the collagen does break down very, very slowly. But if you look at some very old fossils under the electron microscope, you see that characteristic steel cable appearance of collagen showing that tiny amounts of it.

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Not all of it. I mean, it might be 1/10 of 1% of the original amount, but tiny traces of proteins may survive for a very long time, and it's those tiny traces that I've been aiming to get some information. Now I know that you use the protein to establish relationships between and among species.

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But let me ask you this question about it. Before we go into that side, Can you tell from the protein how old the particular being home annoyed or hominid is? No, I can't. It's not like carbon force, not like carbon 14 of potassium argon. Dating those radioactive dating techniques can give us very accurate dates of fossils, and I rely on those to tell me how old the fossil is.

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All I can tell is whether the proteins and that fossil resemble, Let's say those of a human more than that of an ape or more that they're more like an orangutan than like gorilla or something of that sort. So the big big argument we were talking about before was is Rama Piturca's human was removed because human I had to say was because they went extinct eight million years ago was Ronald Piturca's human Unless Rama Piturca's an ape, which was ancestral, perhaps the living apes and humans?

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That was the question. Now my technique. I started doing this research because of that question, because if Republicans were human, then it's proteins should be more like those of living humans than of living apes. On the other hand, if it was an ape than its proteins, could be more like that of one of the living apes, so they could be equally distant from those living apes and living humans.

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At any rate, it should be able to decide that question that I heard the anthropologist arguing so violently about. So I developed a technique, a very sensitive technique coming from my field of nuclear medicine. As a technique known as radio immuno assay involves making antibodies in rabbits and then using a radioactive antibody to find the protein.

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The amounts of protein is so small, as you indicated before that you can't find them with ordinary chemical techniques, and I knew that already. So I decided that if we're going to do this kind of work, we have to come up with a new approach, and I have to be familiar with this technique and have done a lot with it for medical purposes.

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And so I just took this medical technique and applied it to Is that similar to what the chemists call trace spectroscopy, where amounts of particular substance can be discovered in very small trace amounts? Is that what you do with your it's a similar technique is not identical, that that depends upon the kinds of light waves that these compounds give off.

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What mind depends upon is I put a radioactive tracer on a on an antibody, which is like a heat seeking missile. Then then they only tiny amounts of that protein left. That radioactive antibody will wander around and find that protein and latch onto it. And then I can put that I can put the Samp my sample into assimilation counter and detect the presence of the radio activity.

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I never actually directly detect the presence of the protein because it's such small amounts, but I know it's there because if the radioactive tracer is there, then the proteins there, too. Now you can take the protein from another species and compare it with what you found in this instance and establish a relationship or the lack of a relationship.

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That's right, That's what I do. And what have you found? What are some of the things that you found by that methodology? Well, to take the example we've been talking about the big issue of was Ronald Piturca's human. Was it not human? Uh, actually took me a few.

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I did a lot of other problems before I got to that, but that's one of the more interesting ones. When I finally did get Rompin focus material, I found that it reacted really more like an ape than like a human. And about the same time I was finding that, interestingly enough, they started finding more fossils of remote because, remember, I said that before they had found only the jaws and tease.

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Yes, they found a face, and the face didn't look like any other human that we know. It really looked like an orangutan. And then they found some limb bones as well, which they hadn't had before, and instead of finding something that looked like it walked upright on two legs, what they found was something that looked like it climbing around in trees like an April monkey.

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So at the same time that the biochemical, all the biochemical evidence was suggesting that Romney politics was not human, The fossil evidence began coming into, and therefore at this Vatican conference that I was talking about before we were all able to agree, even people who had violently opposed the molecular evidence before.

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We're all able to come to an agreement that the origins of man really probably go back five million years to Africa and that Rama Piturca's probably was not human. Now that has led you most recently to Africa, where you work with Jane Goodall and where you followed wild gorillas in the trees and fields.

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Uh, what were you looking for in examining the live species of the present day? Well, this is really my wife's work more than mine. She she also is, uh, I shouldn't say she also I also she This has been her life's work being an anthropologist, and her primary interest is human origins.

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She doesn't behavioral work, comparative comparative anatomy. She pardon the expression but the sex dead animals, which have died in zoos and compares the the apes with the humans, and she's had a theory for some years, which got a lot of publicity. It was written up in Time magazine a few years ago and nature that the living ape, which is the most like that common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees and gorillas that lived in Africa five million years ago, was a certain type of chimpanzee called a pygmy chimpanzee.

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Now, when we went to Africa, we went to see gorillas and chimpanzees in the wild. Not that particular species. This pygmy chimpanzee. We may do that some other time because we didn't have enough time, the type of chimpanzee that she's particularly interested in the pygmy chimpanzee lives, and I, a bend of the Congo River that's so remote that it takes you six weeks even to get there.

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You have to go through some of the roughest territory in Africa, and then it would take another six, and then you have to stay for a while to observe them, and you only see them from a great distance. It's very, very difficult. You have to take at least six months of your life to do that.

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We only had five weeks so What we did is to go to Rwanda to the Virunga volcanoes of Rwanda, and we tract some wild gorillas and watched them for a few days. And then we went on stage for a couple of weeks with Jane Goodall on the banks of Lake Tanganyika.

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We've been using her name, say a little bit. Would you please Jerry about her work? Jane Goodall has really revolutionized their ideas about what's uniquely human, in a sense, by studying chimpanzees, she went 23 years ago to this chimpanzee reserve in Tanzania, which is a very remote outpost.

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We had to get there by taking a little boat across Lake Tanganyika and then getting a smuggler's boat to take us to her place. But she's worked there alone for many years, and her husband, then husband, Hugo von la Vic, who is a photographer for many years studying chimpanzees in the wild.

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And what she discovered was that chimpanzees a remarkably human like and this was before the molecular evidence began coming up with the evidence that they are much more closely related to us than we previously had thought. Would you use the term humanoid in this instance, humanoid sort of implies outer space, you know, Star Trek and that sort of thing.

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Anthropologists don't use that term that used a human or human like all right, But chimps, for example. You use tools. I mean, everybody has watched television knows that by now. But that was a really revolutionary finding when she discovered that, because up until then, we thought, man, man have to hesitate even to use that term.

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Now, man and woman are the tool users, and we are unique. And they were supposed to be unique in the natural world. And tools stick to break open things. Yeah, well, the first thing she notices that they would take a take a piece to take a little twig and strip the leaves off it and use it a piece of grass and use it to fish for termites.

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They have these gigantic termite mounds in Africa, and termites are a wonderful source of protein. And these chips are so clever that they can take their finger and boy little hole in the termite now and then Take this little stick and put it in there. And the termites all gathered on the stick and they carefully take the stick out without scraping any of them off and then lick them off like eating a lollipop.

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It takes a great deal of skill, and if you watch them teaching their young how to do this, it actually takes them three or four years to learn how to do people who try to do it and they can't do it. It's really it's extremely difficult and extremely skillful, so they have to think ahead.

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They they break off this little twig or a piece of grass and carefully strip it off and shape it, like shaping their fishing rod. They also take take a leave and leaf and crunch it up. It says water. If they're thirsty and his water down in a little place where they can't get it out with their mouth, they'll take a leaf and crunch it up to make it soft and put it down like a sponge and then bring it out and suck it off.

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So they're the only other creatures besides ourselves that are known to do this in a spontaneous fashion In the wild just found many other characteristics they, the family relationships, the dependence of the Children on the on the mother's for long periods of time. One child died of grief when its mother and his mother was killed.

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That sort of thing. She's made these wonderful observations over a very long period of time. Jerry, along with another writer, you invented a fictional character called Ruby. Would you tell me about her? Well, Ruby, the other rider was my wife. I should. We've written a number of articles together.

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Adrian Zelman is my wife's name. She's written many papers on evolution. Ruby was really a takeoff on Lucy as a It Was a Famous Book was a bestseller a couple of years ago by an anthropologist Don Johanson called Lucy. Lucy represents one of the oldest, and certainly the most complete fossil human that's ever been found.

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She was found in Ethiopia. She's called Australopithecus afarensis, which is quite a job breaker. Lucy is much nicer, Uh, and there's 40% of a complete skeleton, whereas before you find a little fragment here, a little fragment there and you had to piece them all together to try to figure out what our ancestors found by one of the Leakey's No, Jon Johansen has been a great competitor of the leaky leaky pair who was Louis Leakey and Richard Leakey, whom we saw during our recent trip to Africa, uh, have discovered a lot of old fossils, discovered a lot of old fossils over a million years old, some over two million years old, showing that our ancestry went very, very far back.

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And then Don Johanson came along and he was a young man. He's a young man about Richard Leakey's age. I guess they're both in the mid forties now. I have them confused. A lot of people do because they're doing the same kind of work. And, uh, Johanson found this specimen, Lucy in Ethiopia.

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Richard Leakey works in Kenya. And so Johansson was very pleased because he found an old the great brass ring. And anthropology is finding the oldest human fossil. That's why the rapid focus finders were so disappointed that they had to admit that theirs is not the oldest human.

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But you see, until Johansson came along, Richard Leakey had the oldest human fossils, and then Johansson came along and found Lucy, and then he said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Now I've got the oldest fossil. He kind of put this Yeah, yeah, yeah. Into a book called Lucy in which he which the leak is found very insulting because he really did kind of lord it over the Leakey's because he had found the eldest fossil.

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So and he came with a lot of conclusions about human ancestry, which Adrian and I didn't agree with. So in order, I guess, in a way, to poke fun at both Johansson and leaky and to put across some of our own ideas about human origins. We wrote this article in the New Scientists, and we use Ruby Ah, we called her Ruby instead of Lucy after a Rolling Stone song.

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Lucy was named after a Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. So So we named our Ruby after Ruby Tuesday, and we hypothesized that these two fossil hunters John D. Handsome any relation John D. Handsome and Rodrick lucky any any relationship. Any relationship to fossil hunters living is purely purely coincidental.

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Anyway, they were searching in a glacier. This came from my work with the frozen mammals to Siberia that they were studying a glacier on Mount Kilimanjaro, which is in Kenya, and they had a long A refrigerated truck, and they found this perfectly preserved specimen of an Australopithecus, which was Ruby.

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So she was brought her home and thought he brought back to London and carefully thought out and taught to speak English and so forth. And then we interviewed her. And of course, we found out what life was really like three million years ago in Africa. Why not?

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Why not? That's right, Jerry. Very quickly, Uh, in our time remaining, there were many charges against paleontologists and anthropologists in the early part of the present century for having contrived, entirely fictional structures of early man from a single teeth or a single jawbone and so forth.

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Are you satisfied that the material that's being presented by scientists in the field today is credible? Built upon the best possible evidence? One of the things I worked on was the Piltdown famous Piltdown you're alluding to. That's right. That's one of the things that I've which I've worked on.

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But I think that the other material which is being presented now is real. Usually there's several people present when it's found it can be very accurately dated. We have much more, much better scientific techniques for validating these things. Now we have the potassium argon method for dating these things.

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So when we say something is a million and a half years old, it's not merely guesswork anymore, as it would have been, let's say, 50 or 60 years ago. So we do have all this technology, and we have a whole new division of scientists in the field now.

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Biologists, yes, but biologists of a molecular sort. And I suppose that's what you are. A molecular molecular biology would be considered a molecular anthropologist at least as far as that part of my life, all right, and chemists who are looking at many of the artifacts of man such as soap, stone and copper and drawing new conclusions from it.

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So with many more scientists in the field looking at man's origins from many new and different perspectives, we may come toward the end of this century. Do you think to, uh, pretty firm understanding of man's relationships with the early primates? Well, I think human origins will always be something which tempts our imagination and speculation and will always be debated, So I think we'll know a lot more by the end of this century, But unless human beings evolved much more rapidly than they have in the past, I think there'll still be a lot of controversy.

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All right. Thank you very much. Uh, Jerry Loewenstein, clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, chief of the Department of Nuclear Medicine at the Pacific School in San Francisco. Thank you very much for being with me on conversation. Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah.