Creation Story

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Latif, how do I pronounce your name?

Because I'm pronouncing it the Yemeni way.

Do you pronounce it the Yemeni way?

I'm like, I'm excited about your pronouncing it the Yemeni way.

Because it's used heavily by Yemenis.

Latif.

Like, just to mean something's nice or something?

Yeah.

Or how's your day going?

Latif.

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 say your name in Yemeni way.

alla alla ala it's like at the end it's too it's too much everyone kept calling me alla and i was like i know i'm great but you know

i think that's too far guys

hey i'm lattif nasser this is radio lab and i'm talking with ella al-shamahi she's a paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist and she's like honestly the modern day indiana jones she travels all over the the place collecting fossils.

Sometimes this takes her into active war zones or through pirate-infested waters.

And she does all of this to help piece together the story of how humans came to be.

Thing is, as well, our story is kind of epic, man.

Our story is 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 kind of surreal.

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, Hermophlorisiensis, who were basically these hobbit-like humans.

They were really short.

They were about three and a half feet tall.

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.

And at the same time that you had the Neanderthals and these penguin people, there were also other groups like the Denisovans.

The Neanderthals of Asia.

There was a species called Homo noleti, another one called Homo luzinensis.

This was the world that we were born into.

A world where our little tribe was competing with these other little human-ish tribes and often losing.

We were constantly not succeeding.

And then we did, and we did so 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.

Okay, so what you're referring to there is something which I guess

I have not really known how to talk about

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.

I was like,

why, why is, why was, why has this been so tender?

I,

you come from a religious background.

I did.

I was very devout.

No way.

Yeah.

And then I went off to high school.

I went off to college and I was like, oh, this isn't what I thought it was.

And the,

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

a Muslim background.

Yeah.

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 community.

Where were you?

Where were you again?

Where did you grow up?

Birmingham, England.

Birmingham.

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.

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 feels like you didn't have that.

Yeah.

No,

clearly, you know, your family exists.

Clearly, there were families and individuals who did explain things like that.

Right, right, right.

But

there was no space for evolution in my family.

There was absolutely none in the missionary world.

And

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 in the whole world,

including Adam and Eve.

It's 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?

Very similar.

They're very, very similar.

The one difference is that the Christians give God a day off.

Muslims are like, 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 13 and like traveled the uk being a missionary and missionary means like you were going to who are you going to talk to well i was speaking to more lapsed muslims okay yeah but also to the wider public That was a hard time.

What years were these like?

Basically, you know, in the 90s, I was basically certainly in the 2000s.

Because I was thinking, like, after 2000, 2000, 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 also, remember, our communities were therefore under more attack.

Right.

I'll say I was really young.

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, chilled out way that I should have done it, like my siblings.

You were more like hard edge about it, maybe than you.

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, 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, you still don't have chill.

Like, you just went from one extreme to the, you know, it's just really funny because they're not wrong.

Like,

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 somewhat similar as you like because like a bunch of my friends like they would they would go to the mosque they would go to masjid there and then they would like but then it's like afterwards like it's like friday night like we're gonna go drinking and we're gonna have fun like and it was like that kind of thing

we would have had thoughts about you no no i i didn't do that all no 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 stricken that those guys wouldn't have even been my friends.

Yeah.

Except that I might have taken them on as projects.

Right.

So, okay, imagine you're a missionary and you're that age and you're good, right?

Yeah.

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?

Yeah.

In our family, having a master's degree is the equivalent of a high school education.

Wow.

Okay.

So

what are all these people?

What did they study?

All kinds of things.

Historians, some legal, but like theology kind of legal minds.

And 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 going to go study evolution because I'm going to 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

to basically

proselytize my version of it.

Okay, 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?

And why that?

Like, why was that the thing you fixated on?

Because I'm a missionary.

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 and and the reason for that is the evolution exists so it's like it's a 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 like 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 yeah 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 blah but you were lying that was a lie i mean i

was it i guess so i i'm not happy with the fact that you use that word but i guess it was yeah because it was it was a lie of a mission 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 like the sound of that.

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.

Look, I was obsessed.

I was a woman on a mission.

And so I turned 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 that was my department.

And by the way, it's kind of hilarious because I was like dressed in 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 jilbab, which is like that full cloak.

Yeah.

Um, not by the way, not that there's anything wrong with like 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.

I remember there was one girl who was also kind of vaguely associated with my world kind of thing.

Yeah.

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, like I'm just thinking that actually there's a different interpretation that we 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 degree.

Like she had a firewall up.

Yeah.

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.

I have an arranged marriage in like

via my Imam, by the way.

My dad wasn't even involved.

That started in university or in grad school?

Oh, my, it was my first semester at university.

The imam suggested to me that, yeah, he wanted me to marry one of his other students.

And I was like, okay.

And so that took a while.

Excited about it?

Were you flattered?

Was that feel good or did 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 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 link these pieces together another way.

We can just, yeah.

I haven't 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 end.

I just picked the wrong puzzle.

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?

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,

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 timeframe.

You're just kind of separating them.

Yeah.

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 yeah

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 not be happening in nature yeah 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 stratigraphy 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 evolutionary process there yeah you just do it's really really hard it's like you dig deeper you see simpler things kind of generally yeah i

you know, it is, forgive my language.

You can't broad, you're like the BBC, right?

You can't broadcast swearing.

No, we can broadcast swearing.

Yeah.

Oh, nice.

I swear I've been cleaning up my language.

No, go for it.

Yeah, like you would, you would be looking at these stratigraphic sequences.

And it was a, 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, 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 you're like, okay, so

you gave a little ground.

You were like, this makes sense.

I can give

all other species.

All the other billions.

That's right.

But not us.

Yeah.

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 every so retrotransposons.

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 this 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 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 there's no other interpretation like like like god would have had to copy paste or something yeah like this is the thing 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 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 mechanisms and blah 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 carbohydrates it's a non-functional bit of dna DNA, and yet its mutation pattern fits almost perfectly with

an evolutionary family tree.

And it was just like,

ah,

it's just, sorry, that's the noise that you make when your whole life is about to fall apart.

That exact noise is the noise you make.

And I was just in hell.

Like I was in hell.

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 going to do?

Were you living with this guy at that point?

Or were you?

My ex-husband.

Yeah.

Were you married?

Yeah.

Our marriage wasn't doing great.

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 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.

You're also, you know, bluntly naked and you're very exposed, but you're in a safe place, right?

And I kind of, I basically, I basically tell myself that I have to find the strength to be honest,

that I just,

I believe in evolution.

And I just fell to the floor.

Like, I just, I was like hysterically crying.

I was just so so distraught

and the the reason I was so distraught at this point was that I knew

that meant I was gonna have to leave my world

How do you leave your whole world and try to join another one?

And what does it do to you if you do that?

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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 biologist at 180 that she feared would basically destroy her life as she knew it.

I had no idea what was going to happen with my family.

You know, this hadn't happened in my family before, right?

But what I did know is it was going to drive a massive wedge.

And

why did it feel, like, why did it feel so existential?

Like, like, like you, these things could not coexist.

There was no room for you to believe in evolution and still be a part of your community.

Because it's such an extreme thing in my world and say that you believe in evolution.

And,

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.

Thank God my siblings came through in the way that they did.

How did they come through?

They decided to embrace me regardless.

They decided that I was their sister regardless.

Makes me want to 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.

You just ghosted people?

Yeah, I literally just disappeared.

And that's because

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

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.

It was like you went into the bathroom with the left foot, you left it with a right foot, you wrote with your right hand.

You did, you, you, like a prophet went

with your left hand.

Yeah, yeah, 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 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 podcast since because no man cared.

Like I had been told my whole life that like, you know, my hair was like, and, you know,

you've got to cover up because it's a fitna.

It's like, it's corrupt, like it corrupts the earth if you, it's a bad translation, but like, you know, isn't it, it's all these things that you, you these things you've got to do to not um because it's like raw it's like raw sexuality it's like that kind of thing is that the funeral i don't know what it was because let me tell you nobody cared like nobody cared nobody i cannot express this enough there were no men dropping from my sheer beauty nobody was fainting nobody 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'm a pale anthropologist, you know you kind of go and and sit with these exotic and inverted 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 yeah me and i would sit there studying people's behavior and like going all right so this is how they act okay so this is okay all right so that's 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, 10, 13 years later, I can look back and go, I'm glad.

that you know i 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'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.

I will never, ever.

ever be in a community like that again.

I think religious communities are warm.

They engulf you.

They embrace you.

Your 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 around the clock.

And it's just kind of oh my god, I feel that 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

I didn't know who I was anymore.

And the people that were around me that would normally love me 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

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-grandparents having it on.

yeah having sex with a nenderthal 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 like one of my and your ancestors yeah

was half half

Right.

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

like pregnant, like that mom is sitting there pregnant, like thinking about what her baby, whether her baby's going to have a brow ridge or a chin or something.

Seriously.

Is there any evidence to suggest that crossovers like Neanderthal and Homo sapiens,

us couplings, made us more successful?

Like that, those.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So

we were the new kid on the block.

And for example, when we entered into Neanderth 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.

And the best one is

the Tibetan example.

Are you familiar with this one?

No, tell tell me.

So Tibetans

live at obviously very high altitude, and the mechanism,

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.

And the mutation is actually one that they inherited off Denisovans.

Like

we drank their superpowers kind of thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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.

What did you gain from that crossover?

I

would say

I was so traumatized by it and still am.

Like within a like 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 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.

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.

And

I then approach it as such.

So then,

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's gently does it for me in terms of the 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.

Ella al-Shamahi.

Again, her show is called Human.

It's on PBS and the BBC.

Man, she's so good in it, and it really features the full menagerie of proto-humans.

The team of fully human humans who put this episode together, not even one Neanderthal among them, was Jessica Young and Pat Walters with help from Sarakari.

It was fact-checked by Diane Kelly.

Special thanks to Hamza Syed and Misha Youssef and you for listening.

We will be back soon with another episode.

I just have to kill this tiny elephant first.

Catch you later.

Hi, I'm Monica and I'm from Mexico City.

And here are the staff credits.

Radiolive was created by Jad Abomroch and is edited by Lauren Wheeler.

Lula Miller and Latis Nazar are our co-hosts.

Elen Kife is our director of child design.

Our staff includes Simon Abler, Jeremy Bloom, W.

Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Pazutierrez, Sindru Jansan Vandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Nissen, Sarah Carrie, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Bitze, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Rebecca Rand.

Our fact-checkers are Diane Keeley, Emily Krieger, Ana Pujor-Massini, and Natalie Middleton.

Hey, Radio Lab, Michael, Tacoma, Washington.

Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P.

Sloan Foundation.