AI Summary
5 min readCreation Story
Ella Al-Shamahi was a missionary at 13. By the time she applied to university, she had a secret plan: study evolution so she could destroy Darwin's theory from the inside. She was a double agent, and she knew it.
"I was like, I'm gonna go study evolution because I'm gonna destroy Darwin's theory," she tells Radiolab's Latif Nasser. "I tackled the underlying assumptions of things. And then to expose them and then to persuade them and then to basically proselytize my version of it."
Al-Shamahi grew up in Birmingham, England, in an ultra-conservative Yemeni Muslim community where evolution was simply not an option. "There was absolutely no space for evolution in my family," she says. "There was absolutely none in the missionary world." She believed humans were created in a week. By 13, she was a missionary traveling the UK to bring lapsed Muslims and the wider public back to the faith. Evolution was the enemy—the reason people stopped believing in God. So she decided to attack it at its source.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Episode Introduction & Guest Welcome** - Host Latif Nasser introduces paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi, who studies human origins in extreme environments.
- 2 (04:40) **Ella's Personal Origin Story Begins** - Ella reveals she came from an ultra-conservative Muslim background and was a devout creationist.
- 3 (07:51) **Ella as a Young Missionary** - At age 13, Ella became a missionary, traveling the UK to bring lapsed Muslims and the public back to her version of Islam.
- 4 (10:29) **The Double Agent Plan** - Ella decides to study evolution at University College London with the secret mission to destroy Darwin's theory.
- 5 (13:39) **The Cracks Begin to Show** - In her evolution classes, Ella starts encountering evidence that challenges her creationist worldview.
- 6 (18:49) **The Breaking Point: Retrotransposons** - Learning about retrotransposons (viral DNA stuck in the genome) shatters her remaining belief.
- 7 (21:10) **The Shower Confession** - Ella has a moment of clarity in the shower where she admits to herself that she believes in evolution.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Ella al-Shamahi is one part Charles Darwin, one part Indiana Jones. She braves war zones and pirate-infested waters to collect fossils from prehistoric caves, fossils that help us understand the origin of our species. Her recent hit BBC / PBS series Human follows her around the globe trying to piece together the unlikely story of how early humans conquered the world. But Ella’s own origins as an evolutionary biologist are equally unlikely. She sits down with us and tells us a story she has rarely shared publicly, about how she came to believe in evolution, and how much that belief cost her.
Special thanks to Misha Euceph, Khalil Andani, and Hamza Syed.
EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Latif Nasser
Produced by - Jessica Yung and Pat Walters
with help from - Sarah Qari
Fact-checking by - Diane Kelly
and Edited by - Pat Walters
EPISODE CITATIONS:
Videos -
“Human” (https://www.bbcearth.com/shows/human), Ella’s show on the BBC and PBS
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