Politics & Power Quote by Louis Leakey

Leakey’s sentence is a scientist’s dare disguised as a dry conjecture. He’s talking about evolution and biogeography, but the real target is intellectual complacency: if you want to explain why related mammals show up on opposite sides of the Atlantic, you have to accept explanations that feel almost outrageous. An “island” drifting from West Africa to South America sounds like fantasy until you remember the time scale he smuggles into the first clause. “Many millions of years” is the rhetorical solvent here; it dissolves the audience’s instinctive objection (“that can’t happen”) and replaces it with the only standard that matters in deep time: low-probability events become plausible when the clock is vast enough.

The subtext is also methodological. Leakey isn’t claiming to have watched an island migrate; he’s modeling a bridge between data and mechanism. In an era when plate tectonics was still settling into mainstream acceptance, and when “land bridges” were a common explanatory tool, this kind of hypothesis sits at the boundary between bold inference and disciplined speculation. The phrasing “some sort of” signals caution, while “crossed” supplies a vivid, almost cinematic motion that keeps the hypothesis from collapsing into abstraction.

Contextually, Leakey is part of a mid-20th-century scientific culture that had to persuade lay readers that nature’s history isn’t neat. The line works because it forces you to inhabit the scale at which evolution operates: not as a tidy narrative, but as a long game where the improbable can be routine.