“What I would do, and I thought it was research, is to Google the terms that I hear on TV,” Soliman says. “And when I did that, the first result that you will get is Wikipedia. So I’d get into Wikipedia, and I got a small notebook. … And I would copy and paste, write down definitions.”

Soliman, a Fulbright scholar and graduate student in biological sciences at Binghamton, has been a researcher ever since. An evolutionary biologist interested in the formation of new and distinct species in Mimulus plants, Soliman studied biotechnology and molecular biology as an undergraduate at Cairo University.

Also known as monkeyflowers because some of its species have flowers resembling a monkey’s face, plants from the genus Mimulus are one of the model organisms used to study evolution.

In trying to answer how different Mimulus plant species are formed, Soliman and her colleagues complete basic plant care such as watering, repotting and fertilizing. Next, they conduct artificial crosses, where they move pollen from one plant to the female parts of another plant. This enables them to explore the reproductive isolation of the two plant species. They also study how much the hybrid seeds produced from those crosses suffer from reduction in fitness compared to their parents. This can help in understanding how separate species are created and maintained over time.

While she’s acclimated now, when Soliman began her master’s program in the fall, her new environment introduced a multitude of obstacles.

“Whenever I thought of my family, I would immediately cry,” she says. “And then I would think, no, I’m not sad. I’m just homesick. But you miss the food, you miss the family. You miss whatever activities you all used to do.”

Soliman eventually found ways to maintain that close connection with her family, making being away from them much easier to manage.

The close relationship Soliman has with her family extends to her education. Due to family influence and cultural norms, she neglected some of the subjects she initially wanted to study.

“In Egypt, astronomy is not a field that will bring you money and food on the table,” Soliman says. “You have to work in the medical field to get money. Because people care about medicine.”

Considering multiple fields chosen through culture and family influence, even researching evolution was risky for Soliman. Still, during her senior year of college, she took an evolutionary genetics course. At that moment, she knew no other topic piqued her interest like this one.

“I started to see in color, like everything before was black and white. Before, I didn’t pay attention, I just did the work to get my A plus,” Soliman says. “But this is when I began bothering and nagging my professor with constant questions.”

As she grew determined to study evolution, Soliman spoke with her professors and learned of the Fulbright scholars program from a chemistry teacher at her school.

This determination to understand more has also translated into Soliman’s work ethic as a researcher at Binghamton. James Sobel, an associate professor of biological sciences and Soliman’s mentor, describes her as unique.

“She is the kind of person who asks questions constantly. She has this drive to know things and a curiosity that is overwhelming,” Sobel says. “That is the only thing I can’t teach a student — or at least I haven’t figured out how to — that intrinsic motivation. It’s one of those things that some students develop, but as a graduate student you either have it or you don’t.”

After completing graduate school in the spring of 2022, Soliman plans to teach at her alma mater. She ultimately wants to continue her research in evolution and obtain a doctorate in the United States.

“Pursue your dreams and do whatever you like even if it’s against the odds,” Soliman says. “Just do the hard work, and everything will come to you.”

“I don’t want to make anyone an atheist,” says Adam Laats, a professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Educational Leadership at Binghamton. “No public school should have that as its goal, just like no public school should be trying to teach kids any religious idea, which would include creationism.”

Laats’ new book, Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution, was published in October by Oxford University Press.

“Creationism is a private issue, and most Americans are some kind of creationists,” Laats says. “Most Americans have some sort of belief that, you know, all this didn’t just happen.”

A Gallup poll last year found that 40% of American adults believe God created humankind within the past 10,000 years. Another third of those polled said humans evolved over millions of years with God’s guidance. Just 22% said they thought humans evolved without any divine intervention.

“Most people who are creationists want their kids to learn evolution in schools,” Laats says. “It’s not a problem.”

The problem arises when people insist that their particular religious beliefs form part of the curriculum. Laats sees two key characteristics of what he terms “radical creationism.”

The first is that it disputes the legitimacy of mainstream science. “Radical creationists say mainstream science is entirely wrong,” he says. “Evolutionary science can’t be right.”

The other part is that radical creationists try to impose their beliefs into the public square. That includes public schools, but also questions such as: Should there be a prayer before a public meeting? Should people say Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays?

A former middle school and high school teacher, Laats says researching this book helped him understand certain anti-science attitudes present in the country today.

“The 2020 political moment, this crisis-fueled moment, has parallels in the history of creationism,” he says. “Understanding that history helps people understand how it is possible that some large number of Americans have confidence in these statements that seem, to me, patently false.”

Laats says there’s a pattern going back to the 1960s of aggressively dissident, competing science that today is expressed when someone labels facts as “fake news.” It’s not that someone like Scott Atlas, a physician and advisor to the White House coronavirus taskforce, hasn’t heard what epidemiologists are saying about the pandemic. “It’s that they dispute the legitimacy of the people with whom they disagree,” Laats says. “And we’re experiencing an acute outbreak at the very top. It’s very easy for people to dismiss what seem like they might be obvious in-your-face truths if you dismiss the source of those ideas.”

Although debates surrounding creationism have certain elements in common with controversies about climate science, Laats says it’s not a fair comparison.

“They get lumped together because they’re the two most prominent science denialism issues out there,” he says, “but they actually have both different histories and different trajectories. Climate change denialism is a lot more like tobacco science.”

Large, well-funded tobacco companies paid to have scientists go over peer-reviewed reports in the 1950s and ’60s and issue statements highlighting the limitations of findings about the dangers of smoking. Some people who cast doubt on climate science have similar financial motivations, Laats says.

“It’s a deliberate, well-funded, intentional, cynical attempt to spread ignorance, or at least doubt about established science,” he says.

The creationism debate isn’t rooted in money, for the most part.

For science educators, this has been an issue for 50 years. And for many of them, it feels outlandish, Laats says. “How can there be a debate? It’s not a debate. There’s science. And then there’s this other thing.”

He’s optimistic that American schools will continue to teach mainstream scientific principles related to evolution. “Even the most ardent anti-evolution groups, like Answers in Genesis, want their kids to learn evolution,” Laats says. “They just don’t trust people like me to teach it to their kids. They don’t want their kids to learn from people that they don’t trust, including secular, politically liberal, union-member types. So it’s not evolutionary theory anymore that they actually have a beef with their children learning, even though they think it’s incorrect.”

From a public policy perspective, that needs to be the end of the discussion, he says, even if some people view that as accommodating science deniers. “Let’s stop fighting,” he says. “Let’s agree to stop talking right there because the rest of it isn’t our business. The rest of it is culture war talk. The way that I think of it is that Americans don’t disagree about evolution. We just don’t like each other. Or maybe a more polite way to say it is we don’t trust each other.”

Laats is the author of three other books about the history of American education: Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education; The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education and Fundamentalism; and Education in the Scopes Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of America’s Culture Wars. He earned a doctorate in U.S. history at the University of Wisconsin—Madison in 2007. His next project focuses on the first systematic attempt at urban school reform in the United States.

An international team contributed to the research, which compared the DNA sequences of 35 modern people living on islands off the coast of New Guinea with DNA drawn from two early human species: Denisovans, whose remains were found in Siberia, and Neandertals, first discovered in Germany.

“Substantial amounts of Neandertal and Denisovan DNA can now be robustly identified in the genomes of present-day Melanesians, allowing new insights into human evolutionary history,” they write. “As genome-scale data from worldwide populations continues to accumulate, a nearly complete catalog of surviving archaic lineages may soon be within reach.”

Andrew Merriwether, a molecular anthropologist at Binghamton University, collected the modern-day blood samples used in the study about 15 years ago in Melanesia. This is the first time full genomes from those samples have been sequenced.

“I’m surprised that these Neandertal and Denisovan genomes made it out to this remote place,” he says. “We know people have been there for at least 48,000 years because we find human remains that go back that far, but no one has ever been able to connect them to any other place. When you compare most of their genome sequences, they don’t cluster with any other group. They’ve been there and been isolated for a very, very long time.”

Earlier studies have revealed some genetic overlap (about 2 percent) between Neandertals and non-African populations and little or no Neandertal and Denisovan ancestry among Africans. This new research suggests Neandertals and modern human ancestors intersected at least three times. It also found an overlap of between 1.9 and 3.4 percent in the genetic codes of Denisovans and modern-day Melanesians.

Skepticism about the new findings is entirely appropriate, says Merriwether, who specializes in reconstructing the past using samples from contemporary populations and ancient DNA from the archaeological record.

“Ancient DNA is always damaged and broken into small pieces,” he explains. “You only need one molecule of modern DNA to outperform all the ancient DNA.”

An independent laboratory did the sequencing of Merriwether’s samples. That, combined with a powerful new statistical technique that was used in the analysis, finally convinced him that the genetic similarities were real.

The cost and time involved in sequencing a full human genome has dropped dramatically. The first, completed in 2003, took 13 years and cost about $2.7 million. Today, it’s possible to sequence a sample in days for thousands of dollars. Still, this type of research still poses significant challenges.

The human genome contains about 3 billion “letters,” and ancient samples are difficult to work with. When people die, their DNA starts breaking down immediately, Merriwether notes, and it isn’t repaired anymore. Normally, a person’s DNA is fixed thousands of times a minute. Bacteria and fungi contaminate most DNA samples taken from human remains, he says, making up as much as 97 percent of the DNA that’s recovered.

Even collecting the modern samples wasn’t a simple task.

Merriwether and longtime collaborator Jonathan Friedlaender of Temple University obtained blood samples throughout the Bismarck Archipelago in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They traveled with George Koki of the Institute for Medical Research in Papua New Guinea and Heather Norton, then a student at Penn State and now a faculty member at the University of Cincinnati.

“It’s challenging to reach these places,” Merriwether says. “They’re volcanic islands with mountains. It’s also the most linguistically diverse place on Earth.”

How diverse? People in this region speak some 800 languages. A common trading language (Tok Pisin) that’s a mix of Polynesian and English helped make it possible for the anthropologists to communicate with residents.

Because malaria is so prevalent in the region, there are many clinics set up to test and treat people. That also meant Merriwether and his colleagues usually weren’t the first people asking residents of these islands for blood samples.

Studies like this one may enable scientists to answer big questions about human migrations and evolution thousands of years ago.

Merriwether is particularly fascinated by the Denisovan DNA fragments found in the Melanesian genomes. How did ancient humans travel — and cross the ocean — to get to Melanesia and when and where did the Denisovan DNA enter our gene pool? Sequencing of additional DNA samples found in Asia may one day help to answer those questions.

“Most people know back a few generations, maybe five generations,” Merriwether says, “but where did we come from before that? That’s what we want to find out.”

The study’s authors are based at Binghamton University, the University of Washington, the University of Ferrara in Italy, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, the University of Cincinnati, the Coriell Institute for Medical Research, the Institute for Medical Research in Papua New Guinea and Temple University.