In 1915, British evangelist Elizabeth Reid Cotton claimed that she had visited Charles Darwin shortly before his death in 1882, and that he’d told her he regretted advancing the theory of natural selection.

“I was a young man with unformed ideas,” he’d said. “I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything, and to my astonishment, the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them.” He begged her to preach to a gathering at his summer house the following day. “If you take the meeting at three o’clock this window will be open, and you will know that I am joining in with the singing.”

It’s not impossible that Cotton did meet Darwin, but his family denied that he had ever recanted the theory. “Dear Sir,” he had written in an 1880 letter, “I am sorry to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the son of God.”