Ella Al-Shamahi
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Everyone kept calling me Alaa, and I was like, I know I'm great, but you know.
The thing is as well, our story is kind of epic, man.
We lived in a world that was a bit like Lord of the Rings.
There was obviously the Neanderthals, which so many people have heard of, but there were all these other species, including one of my favorites, Homo floresiensis, who were basically these hobbit-like humans.
Now, that means humans the size of penguins were living on this island in Indonesia called Flores.
And on this island, there were giant rats and elephants the size of cows.
So humans the size of penguins were hunting elephants the size of cows.
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 wow yeah why why is why was why has this been so tender
I never get to have this conversation with people who have any kind of religious background, let alone a Muslim background.
I think my fear is that I do not want my story to be a stick to beat people who are in religious communities with.
Yeah, so 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.
No, clearly, you know, your family, clearly there were families and individuals who did explain things like that.
There was no space for evolution in my family.
And there was absolutely none in the missionary world.
So I personally believed that we were created in a week, basically.
God created us in a week, as in the whole world, including Adam and Eve.
The one difference is that the Christians give God a day off.
Yeah, I became a missionary at the age of 13 and like traveled the UK being a missionary.
Basically, you know, in the 90s, I was basically certainly in the 2000s.
Well, except that we felt like we had clearly been misrepresented by these lunatics, right?
And also remember, our communities were therefore under more attack.
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 going to just do it in the calm chill that way that i should have done it like my siblings you were more like hard hard edge about it maybe i think i was more hardcore 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're just like, you just didn't have any chill.
So they look at me now and they're like, you still don't have chill.
Like you just went from one extreme to the other.
It's just really funny because they're not wrong.
Like, I could have just, you know, they're just relaxed.
So I was so struck that those guys wouldn't have even been my friends.
Except that I might have taken them on as projects.
Imagine you're a missionary and you're that age and you're good, right?
Your big thing that's hanging over you is what you're going to do at university, right?
Yeah, in our family, having a master's degree is the equivalent of a high school education.
Historians, some legal, but like theology kind of legal minds.
And my dad was very encouraging of us going into the sciences.
I was like, I'm going to go study evolution because I'm going to destroy Darwin's theory.
I tackled the underlying assumptions of things.
You know, OK, so you're saying it's like this.
Well, actually, have you considered it's actually like this?
Have you considered the data could actually fall into this interpretation instead?
My whole purpose is like to bring people to the message, to bring people to God.
And one of the biggest reasons why they're not is that they believe that God doesn't exist.
And the reason for that is the evolution exists.
yeah, that whole monkey story ain't going to fly kind of thing.
So you sat there in the interview and you were like, yeah, so I'm just going to be destroying your theory from the inside.
I just was like, I really want to study genetics.
I love all the evolution classes, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I'm not happy with the fact that you used that word, but I guess it was.
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.
But it wasn't, you know, I was never turning around telling the, you know, other classmates who were.
I mean, if you'd have known me at the age of 18, I was a dork.
So, the idea of being a double agent is somewhat hilarious.
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 university to have like allowed non-Church of England people to kind of join up.
And I went to the Darwin building because Charles Darwin himself, he lived there.
And by the way, it's kind of hilarious because I was like dressed in very, very conservative Muslim garb.
I was in the full jilbab, which is like that full cloak.
By the way, not that there's anything wrong with dressing however you want.
There were a few girls in hijab actually, but they were interested in more medical genetics.
They weren't kind of doing what I was covertly up to.
I remember there was one girl who was also kind of vaguely associated with my world kind of thing.
And she was there and I was so excited because I thought I'd found like a partner in her.
And I was sitting there and I was like, right, so this bit of the theory, 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.
So I'm just living my life being a missionary.
The imam suggested to me that, yeah, he wanted me to marry one of his children.
other um students and i was like okay and so that took a while excited about were you flattered 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 going to agree to marry him and then we basically never talked ever
I just didn't know him, 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.
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 by the way, some people do that to great success.
Some people have won Nobel Prizes on the back of this.
So basically, because Drosophila live for such a short amount of time, you can basically like, you know, 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 with Drosophila in a lab and you're kind of doing it in a much shorter time frame.
And without getting into it, they were starting to see the process of speciation in the lab
But 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.
Like... Stratigraphy, just the layers of earth and that kind of sequence of animals that you get in them.
Yeah, like you would be looking at these stratigraphic sequences and it was, you know, forgive my language, but it was a motherfucker because you were just like, right, we haven't gone from complex to simple.
By and large, we go from simple to complex or more complex.
and it was just a consistent pattern and it's very very hard to explain that
So then I was like, OK, theologically, the real, real issue is Adam and Eve.
So technically speaking, I can believe in evolution as long as it's not Adam and Eve, as long as it's not us.
And then what happened was I came across retrotransposons, which are very, very complicated to explain.
But basically, it's like a foreign organism's DNA within our own bodies.
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.
How does that, like, the only interpretation for the mutations that you find in retro-transposons is that it is evolution through descent with modification over, you know, hundreds of thousands.
This is the thing, because one of the arguments that, for those of you who don't know, one of the arguments that creationists use to explain, well, why is our DNA so similar?
They're like, yeah, but they look similar, and they have so many similar behaviors, and they have so many similar mechanisms.
And on one level, you're like, oh, okay, there is some logic to that.
It's not like, oh, it's a bit of DNA that helps me process, for example, water or helps me process carbohydrates.
And yet its mutation pattern fits almost perfectly with an evolutionary family tree.
it's just sorry that's the noise that you make when 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 what is this like what am i gonna do
Partly because we had an arranged marriage and we didn't know each other.
But partly for a number of different reasons.
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 kind of I basically I basically tell myself I have to find the strength to be honest that I just I believe in evolution
And the reason I was so distraught at this point was that I knew that meant I was going to have to leave my world.
I had no idea what was going to happen with my family.
Because, you know, it hadn't happened in my family before it.
But what I did know is it was going to drive a massive wedge.
Because it's such an extreme thing in my world...
and say that you believe in 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 the way that they did um how did they come through they decided to embrace me regardless um they decided that i was their sister regardless makes me want to cry
And that's because I was a missionary and I knew the training.
And the training is if somebody, you know, falls, you go collect them, basically.
I didn't want anyone else to follow me because I didn't want them to go through what I was going through.
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.
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 went to the toilet with your left hand.
It's like every single thing is prescribed and suddenly it was like, good luck.
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 anticlimactic
And has probably informed a huge part of my personality since, because no man cared.
I had been told my whole life that my hair was like, and you've got to cover up because it's a fitna, it corrupts the earth.
It's a bad translation, but it's all these things you've got to do to not...
I don't know what it was, because let me tell you, nobody cared.
There were no men dropping from my sheer beauty.
But it was, you know, it was quite an adjustment.
It was like, 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 paleoanthropologist, you know, you kind of go and sit with these exotic and inverted commas tribes and you kind of learn their ways.
and I was like my exotic tribe is just central London that's it me and I would sit there studying people's behaviour and like going alright so this is how they act okay so this is okay alright so that's you know I wrote a book about the handshake
Writing a book about the handshake does not come because somebody is like just casually not questioning.
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.
And I was just like, do you understand the trauma that I've just been through?
Certainly, like now, 10, 13 years later, I can look back and go, I'm glad that, you know, I'm not constrained by dogma unless I pick that dogma.
But, you know, let's not pretend that this is a fun world.
I mean, I'd definitely rather be here, but let's not pretend it's perfect.
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.
I will never, ever, ever be in a community like that again.
Somebody ends up in hospital and people get angry with the hospital administration because they're like, what are you talking about?
kind of 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 i i yearn it's so difficult it was like it was like i i didn't know who i was anymore and the people that were around me that would normally love me and and knew who i was they were all new to
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 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-great-grandparents having sex with a Neanderthal.
So there's a scandal in the family, basically.
Now, usually, the way this would be presented is, oh, there's some Neanderthal DNA, so that means that there was some kind of intercourse, blah, blah, blah.
And instead it's like, hold on a second, right?
That means that one of our ancestors, not like a theoretical, one of my and your ancestors was half-half.
And I'm not mixed race, but I'm mixed heritage.
Let me tell you, that was confusing growing up at times, right?
I'm like, what would it be like to not just be mixed heritage, don't be mixed race, but mixed species?
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 wow like pregnant like 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 seriously
And for example, when we entered into Neanderthal territory, 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.
So suddenly we end up with immunities to things that would have taken us ourselves tens if not hundreds of thousands of years to evolve for.
There are some really, really good examples, actually.
So Tibetans live at obviously very high altitude.
And the genetic mechanism by which they are able to exist at high altitude is very different from the genetic mechanism that exists in other populations who exist at high altitude.
The mutation is actually one that they inherited off Denisovans.
Within a second, I could get quite upset about it.
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.
Because I understand that when I am trying to persuade somebody of a scientific point,
Nine times out of 10, I'm not trying to persuade them of one scientific point.
I'm effectively taking apart their worldview.
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, but I just fundamentally at my core understand that when somebody has that belief, it's not one belief, it's a belief system.
What I find myself doing is I actually have less interest in debating that point with them and more interest in bonding with them as a person and showing them who I am and me seeing their humanity.
That's why it gently does it for me in terms of methodology.
And also fundamentally in my mind accepting that they may never believe me.
They may never accept my version of events and that's okay.