Dr. Mary-Claire King

And Alan would say to us,

All living beings have ancestors, but not all fossils have descendants.

And that was at the heart of what he and Vince and the rest of the Wilson lab were working on.

And you can imagine how much blowback that assertion had.

It was terrific.

It was very difficult for the people in the lab.

And my watching it really led me to believe that once your evidence is good, you really have to be very loyal

to your own evidence.

You really do.

You have to be very, very critical of it, but once you're convinced you've got it, you can't cave.

In any case, what our paper did was make the point that these two ways of thinking are absolutely consistent.

We can have molecular evolution that occurs in parallel with and causes anatomic and behavioral and neurological evolution, but

in ways other than one can detect from the fossil record.

So the fossil record is absolutely legitimate.

It tells us one kind of story of evolution.

And molecules are also absolutely legitimate and tell us a parallel story.

And both are true.

After I finished my, well, essentially as I was writing my PhD with Alan

my then-husband and I went to Chile to teach in a cooperative arrangement between the University of California and the Universidad de Chile.

And we went in 72 briefly, and then we went back in 73.