Ancient Egyptians believed human beings evolved from worms, proof that evolutionary ideas are just recycled paganism.

The traceable chain runs through Herodotus, Histories 2.123 (5th century BC), then through a citation in Döllinger's 1906 work, into modern pulpits and apologetics content. What Herodotus actually reports is that the Egyptians held the soul to be immortal, and that when the body dies the soul passes into whatever animal is being born at that moment, cycling through every creature of land, sea, and air over a span of roughly three thousand years before eventually returning to a human body. That's a claim about souls migrating through animal bodies after death: it says nothing about worms specifically, and nothing about the origin or development of humanity as a species.

It's also worth being precise about whose belief this actually is. Herodotus is a Greek writing about Egypt for a Greek audience, and the "soul migrating through all living things" idea he describes matches Pythagorean and Orphic teaching that was current in Greece at the time: a Greek reporting Egyptian religion is a source about a Greek's understanding of Egyptian religion, not a transcript of Egyptian belief. Actual Egyptian creation theology, the Heliopolitan system centered on Atum self-generating from the primordial waters, doesn't include anything resembling a worm-to-human sequence; one tradition even derives the origin of people from the tears of the creator-god, built on a pun in Egyptian between the words for "people" and "tears."

The claim also smuggles in a category error by calling any of this "evolution." A soul cycling through animal forms after death is a transmigration belief; it has nothing to do with the idea evolutionary biology actually describes, which is common ancestry through natural processes over deep time. Collapsing those two very different ideas into one sentence is itself part of what makes the modern claim misleading, on top of it not being what Herodotus said in the first place.