He and his two brothers and two sisters were expected to continue following their faith in college. All but Owen ended up at Asbury College, a small Christian liberal arts school in Kentucky. Lovejoy spent his first years of school at Wheaton College in Illinois. Through it was still a religious school, he was happy to be able to leave home, he says. By this point, Lovejoy had long lost his belief in God.

"I suppose the problem is that if you want to be religious and teach logic and deep thought, it won't work--you face an impasse," he says. "If you rely on logic or the scientific method, it all goes out the door."

But Lovejoy says his own loss of religion came from literature.

"If you start to read great books, it all goes to hell," he says, pointing to Moby Dick and its likes.

The novel, he says, being an allegorical account of the search for a higher power, is full of logic and consideration about the basis of such a search.

"If you combine it with Camus' The Plague and something as seemingly unrelated as The Federalist Papers , it doesn't take long to realize the sheer lack of any logic in believing in a deity, which is, of course, in complete contradiction to the existence of deductive and inductive reasoning in the first place. But the latter can both easily be derived from an understanding of physics and evolution."

However, Lovejoy's professional focus on evolution didn't arise until years later.

He originally studied medicine in college.

"I found it uninspiring--the extreme competition for grades," he says.

He became interested in behaviorism, and after two years went on to what was then Western Reserve University and got his bachelor's degree in psychology.

The summer before he was to return to school to pursue his master's degree, he tagged along with a friend to a dig in southern Ohio, where he met anthropologist Olaf Prufer. Lovejoy was so intrigued by Prufer's work that he followed him to Case Institute of Technology to study with him. There he got his master's degree in anthropology.

Lovejoy began working on his doctorate at the University of Massachusetts, but in 1968 he went with Prufer to Kent State, where the two of them still teach today. He received his doctorate from the University of Massachusetts later that year. He wrote his dissertation while pursuing his post-doctorate in orthopedics in Cleveland. But he says it was worth taking on the heavy load.

"It was the ideal opportunity," he says. "It was a job, and I could get advanced training at the same time."

Although Lovejoy discovered his love for the field out on digs, he soon became a "lab person" and says he never looked back.

"It soon became obvious that you couldn't be the jack of all trades and the master of none," he says.

Lovejoy decided to become the master of human origins by staying put in his lab.

Lovejoy says that human origins have been his focus right from the start of him teaching at Kent State simply because the first job he got was teaching an introductory anthropology class.

When Lovejoy talks about his work, he stresses the word "logic" over and over again. He argues that most of what is published as facts on bipedality is all "erroneous or based on nothing."

His relaxed demeanor becomes a bit more serious, his words more impassioned, as he explains that bipedality is the first thing that distinguishes us from apes, but textbooks still say that the evolution occurred for humans to see over tall grass or to pick fruit.

"That's what I call a sophomore's view of the world," he says. "This was a complex adaptive shift."

But one challenge Lovejoy has found in teaching students that a textbook is wrong is their questions in return.

"If I say a textbook is wrong, I can't leave students hanging," he says. "I have to provide an answer to their questions."

Lovejoy says he responds to that by creating a wholistic view of human evolution in which to teach, a meaningful scenario for how humans evolved.

"I doubt I would have had any answers if I wasn't teaching as much as I was," he says. "That's why universities are symbiotic relationships, or should be. Student feedback is as important as professional ideas. You are constantly faced with intense inquisitiveness."

Maria Serrat, a fourth-year graduate student pursuing a doctorate in biological anthropology, says that Lovejoy's encouragement to look at things differently, like asking how bones developed the way they did rather than creating functional stories to back up evidence, has been one of his greatest lessons.

"Owen always jokes that this is the 'Kent State paradigm' and that we all must make a paradigm shift when we enter the program," she says. "But it truly is what makes this department unique and different than traditional anthropology programs."

Lovejoy doesn't always have the answers to the "how" questions, though.   But he says he always works to find one or engages the student to try it out, as well.  

When Lovejoy isn't busy with his work at Kent State, he co-directs medical students in their theses at the Northeast Ohio Universities of College and medicine and helps out at the Cuyahoga County Coroner's office, as well.