Guiding us on the epic, mind-expanding journey is paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi, who has undergone her own radical evolution. As a teenager, she became a creationist missionary and applied to study evolutionary biology at Imperial College London, specifically aiming to disprove the theory …
[W]hen it comes to science, there’s a lot of distrust that feels almost tribal.
There’s a lot of climate change denial, a lot of vaccine science denial. What’s the OG theory? Evolution. The people that don’t believe in climate science or vaccine science, there are some dishonest players, but most of those people – I know them – genuinely believe that the science is incorrect. And that’s how I felt.
For any evolution doubters out there, what was the thing that changed your mind?
Related on the SLP
The one that I just couldn’t explain in any other way was quite a technical one. Retrotransposons are basically ancient organisms that have entered into us, and the way that they mutate in us compared to our relatives, you just can’t explain those mutations other than descent modification. You just can’t. Trust me, I really tried.
