Rick Potts is no atheist-evolutionist-Darwinist. That often comes as a surprise to the faith communities he works with as head of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History Human Origins Program in Washington, D.C.
Raised Protestant — with, he likes to say, “an emphasis on the ‘protest'” — the paleoanthropologist spends his weekends singing in a choir that sings both sacred and secular songs. At 18, he became a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, because he felt it was antithetical to people trying to understand each other. In college, he studied comparative religion. “I wanted to understand that universality of human beings,” he explains, framed by the early hominin skull casts that line his office on the National Mall. “How do you understand all of human beings as a totality, rather than the divisions between people?”
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