Creation Story

Big news radio lab is The Tribeca Festival podcast stage for a special live show in NYC. We'll be headlining. At the festival. dot com slash audio, that's tribecafilm.com slash audio. Oh y wait, you're listening. Okay? To Radio Lab Lab. Radio Lab from W N Y Latif, how do I pronounce your name?'Cause I'm pronouncing it the Yemeni way. I'm like I'm excited about your pronouncing it the yam anyway. We'cause it's used heavily by Yemenis. Lovely. Like just to mean like something's nice or something?

Yeah. Or how's your day going? Oh yeah, I love it. Oh, that makes me feel so warm. Wait, now pronounce your name for me so I know what how to. Your name again. Ah yeah. It's like a at the end. Oh it's too it's too much. Everyone kept calling me Allah and I was like, I know I'm great, but you know I think that's too far, guys.

Hey, I'm Laddif Nasser. This is Radio Lab and I'm talking with Ella Al Shamahi. She's a paleoanthropologist, an evolutionary biologist, and she's like honestly the modern-day Indiana Jones. She travels all over the place collecting fossils. Sometimes this takes her into Active war zones or through pirate infested waters. And she does all this to help peace. Thing is as well our story is kinda epic man. Our story's epic.

She's got a new TV show out now on the BBC and PBS, and in it she explains that the origin of our species is kinda surreal. that was a bit like Lord of the Rings. There was obviously the Neantithos, which so many people have heard of, but there were all these other species, including one of my favourites, Hermophloresis, who are basically these hobbit-like humans.

Um they were really short. They were about uh three and a half feet tall. Um now that means humans the size of penguins were living on this island in Indonesia called Flores, and on this island there giant rats and elephants the size of cows. So humans the size of penguins were hunting And at the same time that you had the Neanderthals and these Penguin people, there were also other groups like the Denisov. The resistance. A species called homo noleti, another one called homolucinensis.

This was the world that you know we were born into. A world where our little tribe was competing with these other little human ish tribes and often losing. constantly not succeeding. And then we did. So in in the biggest way possible. And the fact that we did, that it was us and not one of these other groups.

Ella says that was extremely unlikely. The story of how that happened is amazing. It's what her TV show is all about. But what I wanted to talk to Ella about was this other very unlikely thing. her origin story. And the fact that she's the one telling us about all this stuff in the first place.

I okay, so what you're referring to there is something which I guess um I have not really known how to talk about. Um God up until quite recently. In fact, one of my friends turned around and said, just last year you said that you might go to your grave with this. Uh Oh yeah. Ha ha. Why why is, why was, why has this been so tender? I You come from a religious background, right? I was very devout. Oh wa

Yeah. And then I went off to uh high school. I went off to college and I was like, oh, this isn't what I thought it was. And the Yeah, I don't know. I did not know that. Yeah. I never get to have this conversation with people who have any kind of religious background, let alone um a a Muslim background. Yeah. Um I I think my fear is that I do not want my story Yeah. To be a stick. to beat people who are in religious communities with

I don't want that either. And actually, I feel like hearing Allah's story in her own words and how surprising and insightful and moving it is. Like I think it'll do the opposite. So I just asked Ella to tell me about it starting from the beginning. The community was incredibly tight. It was incredibly protective. It was absolutely overprotective as well. You know, like As a woman, I'm sure, yeah.

Oh my god, yeah, like I didn't wear trousers, I didn't wear makeup. It was it was an ultra conservative um community. Where were you again? Where where did you grow up? Birmingham, England. Birmingham England. Yeah. So um my parents are Yemeni, but the community was kind of quite pan-Arab. And regardless of The denomination you came from, or the sect, or whatever, you were pretty much anti-evolution. And I really, really took to it.

Like for me, this okay. So the way when I grew up, it was this feeling of, okay, evolution is true, but Allah is this. invisible hand guiding evolution. It it feels like you th you didn't have that. Yeah. No. Um, clearly, you know, your family exit clearly there were families and individuals who did explain things like that. Bye. There was no space for evolution in my family. And there was absolutely none in the missionary world. And um

What did you believe? Like what was the creation story that you believed? Yeah. How did you think people came to be? So I personally believed that we were created in a week, basically. God created us in a week, as as in the whole world, um including Adam and Eve. Weird. I feel like I know the Christian creationist story better than I know the Muslim creationist story in a way. Or is it

Very similar. They're very, very similar. The one difference is that the Christians give um God a day off. Muslims are like God d God doesn't need a day off Anyway, so Ella was all in on this version of Islam, and before she even learned how to drive, she started sharing it with other people. Yeah. I became a missionary at the age of thirteen and like travelled the UK being a missionary. And missionary means like you were going to who were you going to talk to?

Well, I was speaking to m more lapsed Muslims. Okay, yeah. But also to the wider public. That was a hard s what y what years were these like? Basically, you know, in the nineties I was basically certainly in the two thousands. Because I'm I was thinking like after two thousand, that would have been a much harder job talking to the lay public about Islam.

Well, except that we felt like we had clearly been misrepresented by these lunatics, right? By these terrorists. And and also remember our communities were therefore under more attack. Right. I'll say I was really young. Um, I it was kind of the world I knew, and I guess I have always been an all-or-nothing kind of person. Like I clearly do not know how to do things in halves.

And so I was like, okay, so this is the world around me. I'm not gonna just do it in the calm, chilled out way that I should have done it, like my siblings. You were more like hard hard edge about it maybe then. Hardcore. You were more hardcore than your siblings. I mean, you know, if you were to speak to them and I don't want to put words in their mouth, they they're just like you just

didn't have any chill. You know, so it's really funny. So they look at me now and they're like, yes, still don't have chill. Like you just went from one extreme to the other, you know. Right. It's just really funny because they're not wrong. Like it I I could have just you know, they're just relaxed. Was it one of those things like I remember for us, like it was like

Like and I was I I feel like I was so somewhat similar as you like'cause like a bunch of my friends, like they would they would go to the mosque, they would go to Masjid and then they would like but then it's like afterwards like it's like Friday night, like we're gonna go out drinking and we're gonna have fun. Like and it was like that kind of thing. We would have had thoughts about you.

So I w I didn't do that. But my my buddies did that and I was the straight edge kid who was like, no no no. I'm not drinking. I'm not I'm not I'm not smoking weed. I'm not doing any of these things. So I was so stroked that those guys wouldn't have even been my friends. Yeah. Except that I might have taken them on as projects. Right. Sorry, okay.

Imagine you're a missionary and you're that age and you're good, right? Yep. Your big thing that's hanging over you is what you're going to do at university. Because that was a big deal in your family? In our family, having a master's degree is the equivalent of a high school education. Wow. Okay, so and who were what are all these people? What did they study?

all kinds of things, um, historians, some legal but like theology kind of legal minds. Um and uh my dad was very encouraging of us going into the sciences. Other people from her community had studied science to go into medicine or engineering, but Ella had a different idea. I was like, I'm gonna go study evolution because I'm gonna destroy Darwin's theory. Wow. Yeah, tackle the underlying assumptions of things.

And then to expose them and then to persuade them and then to like like To to to basically um proselytize my version of it. Yeah. You know, um, okay, so you're saying it's like this. Well actually have you considered it's actually like this? Yeah. Have you considered the data could actually fall into this interpretation instead? And and why that? Like what why was that the thing you fixated on?

Because I'm a missionary. My whole my whole purpose is like to bring people to the message, to bring people to God. Right. And and one of the biggest reasons why they're not i i i is that they they believe that God doesn't exist and and and the reason for that is the evolution exists.

So it's like it it so it really is like a like for you it I mean it feels like it's it's like the same debate from like Darwin's time. Like it's like oh we're Oh my god yeah you think we came from apes, we came from God. Yeah. That whole monkey story ain't gonna fly kind of thing. So so okay, so so when you applied, like what did you say or what did they

Yeah, somebody asked me this recently. They were like, Hold on, hold on. So you sat there in the interview and you were like, Yeah, so um I'm just gonna be destroying your theory from the interview. That's right. Yeah, what did you say? None of that. I just was like, I really want to study genetics. I think it's amazing. Um, I love all the evolution classes, blah blah blah. But you were lying. That was a lie. I What is it?

I guess so. I'm I'm not happy with the fact that you use that word, but I guess it was. Yeah. Because I it was it was a lie of omission. Right. For sure. Yeah. Well actually I guess it must have been a lie because When they ask you why do you want to study this, the actual answer is because I want to destroy this. And I clearly wasn't saying, ah damn it. Did you was this like a private mission or did you talk to people about this?

My my the other missionaries all knew about this. Yeah. So yeah, so but it wasn't, you know, I was never turning around telling the, you know, other classmates who were You were a double agent, basically. I I like the sound of that. I mean, y if you'd have known me at the age of eighteen, I was a dork. So the idea of being a double agent is somewhat hilarious.

Look, I was obsessed. I was a woman on a mission. And so I turn up to University College London, which for those of you in the know is known as the Godless Place on Gower Street because it's the first um university to have like allowed non Church of England people to to kind of join up. And I I went to the Darwin building because Charles Darwin himself He uh he lived there. Yeah. Um and that was my department. And by the way, like it's kind of hilarious because I was like

dressed in very, very conservative Muslim garb. I wasn't even just in a hijab. I was in the full um so I wasn't just in the head covering, I was in the full jalbab, which is like that full cloak. Yeah. Um not by the way, not that there's anything wrong with like with with

dressing however you want. I'm like, man, you just be you, you know. There were a few girls on hijab actually, but they were interested in more medical genetics. They weren't kind of doing what I was kind of what I was covertly up to. Right.

And I remember there was one girl who was also kind of vaguely associated with my world kind of thing. Yeah. Um, and she was there and I was so excited because I thought I'd found like a partner in her. I was like, Oh my God. And I was sitting there and I was like, right. So

This bit of the theory, uh, like I'm just thinking that actually there's a different interpretation that you can have for this data, blah, blah, blah. And she just freaked out and she looked at me and she was just like, Look. I'm here because this is a mandatory course. I have to pass this evolution class. Otherwise I don't get my Like she had a firewall up. But for Ella? There was no wall. Like she was pushing these two worlds right up against each other.

So there's like two things going on, right? So I'm just living my life, being a missionary, uh have an arranged marriage in like uh w via my imam, by the way. My my dad wasn't even involved. Started in in university or in grad school or It was my first semester at university. Um the Imam suggested to me that yeah, he he wanted me to marry one of his other um students. And I was like, okay. And so that took a while. Were you flattered? Were th was that did that feel good or did that feel icky?

You know what? Like I I didn't know him. I had three chaperoned meetings with him to decide if I was gonna agree to marry him. And then we basically never talked ever. I can't explain it enough. I just didn't know him. Right. You know, and like we had to get my dad to agree. And so that took a while because dad didn't want me getting married before I'd finished my first degree. And so we had to wait and

So, you know, all of this was going on. I was, you know, traveling up and down, like doing this, doing that. And at the same time, it's like it's just constantly like picking at this this this theory of Darwin's, right? I mean, effectively what I was doing was trying to unpack a massive puzzle. Now everybody else had already unpacked it 150 years ago. And I'm coming along being like, hold on. Hold on, we can be We can just Yeah.

thought of something. Give me a minute. And by the way, some people do that to great success. Some people have won Nobel Prizes on the back of this. I just picked the wrong puzzle. Right. So Ella is going to class every day, learning about the evidence for evolution and the story the scientists say that that evidence tells us. And of course she's looking for holes in that story.

And one of the first holes that Ella had always noticed was that particular moment in evolution when one species somehow like poof becomes another. Like, how does that happen? And then one day, she's sitting in class and the professor starts talking about this experiment.

the Drosophila fruit fly experiment. Yeah. So basically because the because Drosophila live for such a short amount of time, you can basically like, you know, um, instead of it being, you know, a mountain pops up between two animals and it takes like, you know, hundreds of thousands of years for them to evolve. You're doing it in with Drosophila in a lab and you're kind of doing it in a much shorter time frame. You're just kind of separating them. Yeah. Um and

Um, oh without getting into it, they were starting to see the process of speciation in the lab. And I was like, oh, that's not good. Because if we're watching them become new species, we're watching evolution, which I don't think happened. But my My only comfort with that experiment was that it was being done in the lab. And I just thought, Okay, but that might not be happening in nature. Maybe it's being forced in the lab. Maybe in nature that wouldn't be happening.

But she keeps going to more lectures and eventually she's running into other problems like strategic. Geography, just the layers of earth and that kind of sequence of animals that you get in them. And they are broadly chronological. And you do see an evol evolutionary process there. Yeah. You just do. It's really, really hard. Like you dig deeper, you see simpler things, kind of, generally. Yeah, I, I...

You know, it is forgive my language. You can't broad you're like the BBC, right? You can't broadcast swearing. We can broadcast firing. Yeah. Oh nice. Sorry, I've been cleaning up my language. Um, yeah, like you would you would be looking at these um stratigraphic uh sequences and it was um you know, forgive my language, but it was a motherfucker because you were just like, right. We've we haven't gone from complex to simple. By and large we go from simple to complex. Right.

neu'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r To explain that.

So then I was like, okay, theologically the real, real issue is Adam and Eve. Right? So technically speaking, I can believe in evolution as long as it's not Adam and Eve. As long as it's not us. We're the exception, right? Right, right. So so you're like, Okay, so th so so you gave a little ground. You were like, This makes sense, I can give it a Yeah. All the other billions. That's right. But not us.

Yeah. Um and then what happened was I I came across retrotransposons, which are very, very complicated to explain, but basically it's like a foreign organism's DNA within within our own bodies, within every every So retro transposons. They're little bits of DNA from, for example, a virus that infected our ancestors millions of years ago and just like got

Stuck in our genome and passed on from generation to generation. They're like this little historical record of something that happened to us a long, long time ago. And the reason Ella remembers. Is that when she was learning about retrotransposons in a lecture, the professor mentioned this weird fact about these little bits of DNA.

The pattern of mutations within the retrotransposons that we have align on a family tree with what you would expect from evolution if you then looked at those same retrotransposons within chimps. In other words, these little bits of DNA, I mean there are hundreds of them, are lodged in the CHIMP genome in exactly the same places that they're lodged in our genome.

How does that like the only interpretation for the mutations that you find in retrotransposons is that it is evolution through descent with modification over, you know, hundreds of thousands of years. There's no other interpretation. Like like g like God would have had to copy paste or something. Yeah. Like or this is Because one of the arguments that for those of you who don't know, the one of the arguments that creationists use

to explain, well, why is our DNA so similar? Yeah. Right. Like, why why is our DNA so similar to chimps? They're like, yeah, but they look similar and they have so many similar behaviors and there's so many similar mechan mechanisms and blah blah. And on a level, on one level, you're like, oh, okay, that is actually like there is some logic to that. Yeah. Retrotransposons

They're not functional. Yeah. It's not like, oh, it's a bit of DNA that helps me process um, for example, water or helps me process um a carbohydrates. It's a non-functional bit of DNA, and yet its mutation pattern fits almost perfectly with. an evolutionary family tree. And it was just like It's just sorry, that's the noise that you make when you your whole life is about to fall apart. That that exact noise is the noise you make. And I was just in hell. Like I was in hell. Um

There'd be times where I'd just be looking out my window, just going, Oh my God, like, oh, what is this? Like what am I gonna do? Were you living with this guy at that point? Or what what were you He's gone, my ex-husband, yeah. Married?

Yeah, our marriage wasn't doing great. Um, partly because we had an arranged marriage and we didn't know each other, but partly for a number of different reasons, one of which was this issue. Like, you know, he like I I was clearly struggling and then there was a moment just an awful moment, which was kind of I was just in the shower. And as you often do in the shower, you're kind of just having a conversation with yourself. Um you're also, you know, bluntly naked and and you're very exposed.

But you're in a safe place, right? And I and I kind of I basically I basically tell myself that I have to find the strength to be honest. I believe in evolution. And I just fell to the floor. So destroyed. And the the reason That meant I was gonna have to leave my world. Your whole world. If you do that. We'll be right back.

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Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radio Lab. I'm talking with Ella Al-Shamahi, who went into college as a creationist and came out an evolutionary biology. at one hundred eighty that she feared would basically destroy her life as she knew it. I had no idea what was going to happen with my family. Because, you know, this hadn't happened in my family before, right? But what I did know is. It was gonna drive a massive wedge. And

Why did it feel like why did it feel so existential? Like like like you could these things could not coexist. There was no room for you to believe in evolution and still be a part of your community. it's such an extreme thing in my world, and say that you believe il evolution. And um you know, that's just we just didn't do that. And by the way, all cases where that did happen, like let me tell you, loads of those girls got cut off.

Um thank God my siblings came through in in the way that they did. Wow. How did they come through? They decided to embrace me regardless. Um they decided that I was their sister regardless. Ugh, makes me wanna cry. And what about like your friends and other people in the community? I didn't tell people. I just disappeared. I didn't tell people. Yeah. Uh I literally just disappeared and

That's because um I was a missionary and I knew the training. And the training is if somebody, you know, right falls, you go collect them basically. Yeah. And I did not have the energy. And also this is the strange thing. I didn't want anyone else to follow me because I didn't want them to go through what I was going through. I was like, no, you know what? You don't need to learn about evolution. You just stay where you are. Yeah. This is awful. Yeah. Um, it was truly awful time.

I had no idea how to exist in a secular world. Suddenly every single thing did not have a rule attached to it. Which you might think is freeing, except if that's the only thing you've ever known, that's terrifying. Yeah. It was like you went into the bathroom with a left foot, you left it with a right foot. You wrote with your right hand. You d you are you Yeah, yeah, it's that every single thing is prescribed and suddenly it was like I didn't make eye contact with men. Yeah.

I literally never made eye contact with men. I I I took my headscarf off and um I basically I turned up to the to like a gas station. Yeah. And it was the most And has probably informed a huge part of my personality since because no man cared.

Like I had been told my whole life that like, you know, my hair was like and and you know you got gotta cover up because it's a fitna, it's like it's corruption it like it it corrupts the earth if you um I it's a bad translation but like you know isn't it's All these things that you these things you've got to do to not um 'Cause it's like raw it's like raw sexuality. It's like that kind of thing. Is that the feeling?

I don't know what it was, because let me tell you, nobody cared. Like nobody cared. Nobody cared. I cannot express this enough. There were no men dropping from my sheer beauty.

was doing anything like nobody cared and it was so funny but it was you know it was quite an adjustment it was like i've i've got to now learn to fit in and it's funny because i think anthropologists traditionally and as you know i am a pale anthropologist You know, you kind of go and and sit with these exotic and inversed commas tribes and you kind of learn their ways.

Right. And I was like, my exotic tribe is just central London. You know that's it. Me and I s would sit there studying people's behaviour and like going, All right, so this is how they act. Okay, so this is okay. All right. So that

Um, you know, I wrote a book about the handshake, right? Writing a book about the handshake does not come because somebody is like just Casually not question Writing a book about the handshake comes when you are obsessively reading the behavior of every person around you because in your culture you never shook hands with men. Right. I had this one friend who was just like Oh, you must be so relieved to be free.

And I was just like, do you understand the trauma that I've just been through? Like I didn't want this. This isn't what I wanted. Certainly like now, ten, thirteen years later, I can look back and go, I'm I'm glad. that, you know, I'm I'm not um constrained by dogma unless I I pick that dogma. But, you know, let's not pretend that this is a fun world. I mean, it's I I'd definitely rather be here, but let's not pretend it's perfect. Like I think the community thing is such a

I think this is what I have found really, really, really difficult to explain to so many of my secular friends who are basically my tribe now, let's be honest, right? Yeah. Uh I will never ever Ever be in a community like that again. I think uh religious communities are warm, they engulf you, they embrace you. Your hot water goes off.

Um everybody offers you their place. Um somebody ends up in hospital and people get angry with the hospital administration because they're like, what are you talking about? Only two people during visiting hours and what's this visiting hours? This person needs us. All round the clock. Oh my god, I feel I'm raising kids right now and I'm not raising them in the mosque that I grew up in and it's like it's sad. It's I s I I yearn.

It's so difficult. It was like it was like I I didn't know who I was anymore. Mm-hmm. And the people that were around me that would normally love me and and knew who I was, they were all new too.

And in the midst of all this upheaval, Ella was still going to school and starting to become obsessed with the thing she would spend her entire career studying, our origin story. That moment when there were all these little groups of proto-humans living together on the planet at the same time, but also very much separate from one another. I think it is no surprise that having gone through what I've gone through, that when I look at our story.

the science of our story, that I I feel something. Like I feel something. We know that everybody from outside of Sub-Saharan Africa, and even some people within Sub Saharan Africa, have some Neanderthal DNA in them. And that can only be explained by basically one of our great great great gr grandparents having sex with a Neanderthal. So there's a scandal in the family basically.

Now, um usually right the way this would be presented is oh there's some neanderthal DNA, so that means that there was uh there was some kind of intercourse, blah, blah, blah. All right. We take a moment. And instead it's like, hold on a second, right? That means that one of our ancestors Not like a theoretical I like one of my and and your ancestors. Yeah. And I'm I'm uh not mixed race, but I'm mixed heritage. So I'm a British Arab, right?

Right. Let me tell you, that was confusing growing up at times. Right. At times I was like, it was a bit weird. I'm like, what would it be like to not just be mixed heritage, don't be mixed race, but mixed species? Like what would that have been like?

And what would the mother have felt? Like how would she have felt? Would she have been sitting there hoping that the child would look more Homo sapiens than Neanderthal? Because you know, she doesn't want them to get ostracized, she doesn't want them to get too. Like pregnant. Like feel like that mom is sitting there pregnant, like thinking about what her baby whether her baby's gonna have a brow ridge or a chin or something.

Is there any evidence to suggest that crossovers like Neanderthal and Homo sapiens uh uh us couplings made us more successful? Like that those Yeah. Yeah. We were the new kid on the block. And for example, when we entered into Neanderthal territory. Uh Neanderthal territory being kind of Europe and Northern Asia. We would not have had immunities to local diseases. So when we interbreed with those people, it's effectively like a cheat.

we end up with immunities to things that would have taken us ourselves tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years to uh to evolve for. There are some really, really good examples actually, and and the best one is um Uh the Tibetan example. Are you familiar with this one? No, tell me. So uh Tibetans um

uh live at obviously very high altitude. And the mechanism, the genet the genetic mechanism by which they are uh able to exist at high altitude is very different from the genetic mechanism that exists in other uh populations who exist at high altitude. And the mutation is actually one that they inherited off the Nisovan. Like we do like we drank their superpowers kind of thing. Okay, so now so there are these sort of hybrid people. Yeah. And

And you are kind of like in a way, you're you're one of these crossover people. I mean, this experience, this ordeal that you went to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um but like What so okay, so if this is if that's the value of the crossover person, it's like, oh, I can get I I now have superpowers from both worlds or something. Um what did you gain from that crossover? I I would say

I was so traumatized by it and still am. Like within a like a a second, I could get quite upset about it. Um and I think when you've been through that. You are much more patient with people who deny the science, don't trust the science. Um, because I understand that I am when I am trying to persuade somebody of a scientific point. Nine times out of ten, I'm not trying to persuade them of one scientific point. I'm effectively taking apart their worldview.

Yeah. And because I've gone through that, I approach that with empathy by and large. Doesn't mean that every so often I don't get irritated. Um, but I just fundamentally at my core understand that when somebody has that belief.

It's not one belief, it's a belief system. And um I then approach it as such. So then what's What I find myself doing is I actually have less interest in debating that point with them and more interest in in bonding with them as a person and showing them who I am and me seeing their humanity. does it for me in terms of m methodology. And also fundamentally in my mind accepting that they may They may never accept it. Then that's okay. Yeah. Not even one Neander Tall among them.

Jessica Young and Pat Walton. Special thanks to Hum Socia. And you Catch you later. Hi. I'm Monica, an aunt of Mexico City. And here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrot and is edited by Zoran Wheel. Lulumiller and Latif Nazar are our co-hosts. Stuff. Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, W. High Fortuna, David Cable, Maria Pazuta. With help from... Our thought checkers are Diane Healy, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujolmasini, and Natalie

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