Adam Andis was raised as a creationist, but grows up to become an evolutionary biologist.

Adam Andis is a PhD student at Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies where he uses population genetics and landscape ecology of vernal pool amphibians to understand ecological and evolutionary dynamics…or to put in more succinctly, he plays with frogs in the woods. In addition to frog-science, Andis also loves designated Wilderness. He was a founding board member of the National Wilderness Stewardship Alliance and spends summers guiding wilderness expeditions in Alaska. He loves taking photos, too. You can check them out on Instagram @azandis

This story originally aired on July 14, 2017.

Story Transcript

So I’m from the heartland of the United States in the Midwest.  When I was first born, my family and I lived in a trailer home on the hills and the outskirts of this town called Gnaw Bone, Indiana.  We went to the kind of church where people regularly spoke in tongues, and travelling evangelists would come and they would cast out demons.  We believed in faith healing. 

It’s a kind of church where people were baptized in cattle troughs or in bathtubs or in pools.  Really, any time that there's standing water seems like a good excuse to have your second or third or fourth baptism, it seemed like. 

So eventually, my parents divorced and we moved to a new, more progressive church.  But I have to say “progressive” with very, very heavy air quotes because this is the same Indiana church consortium that we shared with now-Vice President Mike Pence.  So it’s only progressive in context. 

But it was at this church that a leading speaker really inspired my trajectory in life.  The speaker was from an organization called Answers in Genesis, and the organization’s mission is to expel the dogma of evolution and replace it with a biblical interpretation of the creation story. 

So the speaker told us about how the stories in Genesis are real.  The world was really created in six days, just as it says in the book, and that happened about six thousand years ago.  That Noah’s flood really did occur and it lasted for about a year, four thousand years ago.  And that everyone spoke the same language before the Tower of Babel, that giants really existed, like Goliath from the story of David and Goliath. 

But, more importantly, it told about the earth before the flood, that there was this hydrogen firmament that enveloped the globe and it kept in higher concentrations of oxygen and humidity.  It also filtered out all the blue light so it cast the whole globe in this rosy hue. 

During the flood, there were these giant geysers that shot up through the earth’s crust, and this is what created the tectonic action that created mountains and inscribed things like the Grand Canyon into the crust of the earth.  But those geysers also broke the firmament.  All that hydrogen came raining down as rain, which caused a global flood and, of course, it released all the oxygen which led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.  Because dinosaurs are denser and heavier, they were the first to settle in this newly formed sediment of the flood, which is why we have stratification in the fossil record. 

So I’m this ten-year-old kid sitting in the pew and I am just enrapt because this gentleman has just handed me this story that perfectly weds everything that I knew and loved about the natural world from science and fit it to this narrative that I knew and love from the Bible.  At that moment, I knew what my path in life was.  I was going to be a world-renowned creation scientist. 

So I took it seriously, and I bought every book that my meager ten-year-old savings could afford from this gentleman and I memorized everything that I could.  All the facts and explanations that those books afforded, I just soaked it up.  But the thing that those books really taught me was that the biggest obstacle I would face as a creation scientist was the systematic bias against alternative theories perpetuated by the secular scientific establishment. 

So in addition to having these facts and explanations, I also had this moral imperative that I was a crusader of the truth.  So I marched off to school with this moral imperative and with this very literal explanation of how the world works. 

Any time a biology teacher in high school would tell me about speciation and how two animals could come from a common ancestor, I would say, “That’s absurd.  Because think about it.  if you have a crocodile and a hummingbird, to think that they could come from the same species due to nothing but random genetic mutations, that’s like thinking a tornado could come through a junkyard and create a perfectly formed Boeing 747.  Or that a chicken randomly plucking at a keyboard could draft a perfect facsimile of Moby Dick.” 

Or if someone brought up transition fossils or transition species like Archaeopteryx, a feathered dinosaur, and claim that it was a transition between reptiles and birds, I would say, “Why couldn’t it just be a dinosaur with feathers?  After all, platypuses have a duckbill and a leathery tail like a beaver, but we don’t think that they're transition species between beavers and ducks.” 

So I really followed this martyr’s errand because I was—I was a crusader.  I took this all the way through my undergrad.  I went to a little school in northern Wisconsin and I kind of shifted my focus and gravitated more towards ecology and environmental studies rather than taking evolutionary biology head on. 

But one of the amazing things about this school that I was surprised was to meet all of these people who had wildly different backgrounds than I had experienced in Indiana.  And these people who lived very different lifestyles.  So I met folks who were gay, who were transsexual, who were atheists, people who had very, very disparate ideas than anything I had ever experienced. 

One of the things that surprised me the most was that, from everything that I'd read in the Bible, these are some of the most Jesus-like people I’d ever met.  They were kind, they were compassionate, they were generous, and I really struggled for a long time with this.  Because the moral compass that I was given in the Bible told me that these folks are amoral, but my kind of internal moral compass told me that these are wonderful people and it shouldn’t really matter who they chose to love or how they choose to live.  I struggled with this for a really long time.

The only way that I could kind of make those two arrows of the compass align was through really arduous Bible verse cherry-picking or these kind of theological acrobatics and justifications.  But one of the tenets of creationism is that the book is a literal document.  It was written the way it was meant to be interpreted.  It’s not in play to try and cherry-pick and make justifications. 

So all this struggle kind of precipitated into this slow erosion of my faith and the literal nature of the Bible.  I realized that it probably wasn’t meant to be taken literally and, in a lot of instances, it was probably just flat-out wrong. 

The wonderful thing that happened because of that realization is that it absolved me of the need to try and shoehorn all of the facts I knew from science into this proscribed narrative.  I felt like I had been spending years just trying to pound puzzle pieces together that I just couldn’t get them to fit and then someone had delivered me a box with all the missing pieces and everything started to fit together. 

So as I was progressing away from creationism, my parents were moving in the opposite direction. 

So this was really my reawakening to science.  I set a new trajectory in life that brought me here to Yale.  Now I study ecology and evolutionary dynamics.  But every time I would go home I would see a new book on my parents’ bookshelf, like Taking Back Biology or The Truth in the Fossil Record, or The Greatest Hoax on Earth.  And they started going on vacation to the Creation Science Museum in Kentucky, which is great.  On the foyer in the entryway, there's an animatronic dinosaur playing with an animatronic kid because, before the flood, dinosaurs and humans walked on earth at the same time. 

It’s been really hard for me especially because I know how I felt about people in my position when I was a creationist, the kind of ivory tower academic elite who are advocating for the secular agenda and just trying to sweep away and obscure any evidence of creationism.  It’s really sad to have this perspective and to know that my parents… I’m probably the only first-generation college student whose parents are disappointed that he's getting a PhD. 

For the most part, it’s been easier to just avoid all these conversations.  We tend not to talk about what I do now. 

But I was on this seven-hour drive from Denver, Colorado to Telluride for my brother’s wedding and we had lots of time on our hands and there are all these questions that I just never thought to ask, or subconsciously intentionally never thought to ask maybe, when I was a creationist that I’m just dying to ask.  So I asked my stepdad about the Noah’s Ark story. 

Noah was building an ark for two of every animal to survive a global flood.  So I asked him in the creation theory, all species that we've ever found in the fossil record had to have existed at the same time.  Which means that Noah, when he was building this ark for two of every animal, must have also intended for every species, including dinosaurs, to fit on this floating box.  And that seems like an untenable amount of biomass. 

But my stepdad didn’t really even miss a beat and said, “Well, obviously Noah took baby dinosaurs,” which is an attractively plausible explanation.  So even if Noah did take baby dinosaurs, how was he able to provide habitat for both a Namib sand gecko and a polar bear before the era of modern climate control?  Or how was he able to provide food for obligate feeders like koalas that only eat eucalyptus or monarchs that only eat milkweed? 

There are endless questions that you could ask to poke holes in these theories, but in the end, there's also an endless number of equally plausible answers.  I think that’s the thing that my ten years as a creationist really impressed upon me is an appreciation of story and the realization that no matter how great the facts are that every scientist or however robust my evidence is, it’s only as good as the narrative in which it’s embedded. 

So while I'd like to think that, for me, being a better scientist just means being a better storyteller, when I look back at my own progression, it really wasn’t the facts or the stories that made me change my mind.  It was the people.  So I’m starting to think now that for me to be a better scientist, it’s more about the infinitely harder task of just being a better person, of being the kind of person that people inherently trust, and the kind of person who has the patience to walk with someone along their journey of discovery. 

I know I’m a long way from that, and I still have probably a lot of self-discovery in myself to go through, but, in essence, it’s just like everything that I love about science.  No matter where you are, there's always a ton more to discover and a lot more work to do. 

Thanks.