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Evolution and crown. It’s a new, five-part BBC nature show Chris Packham he is the successor to David Attenborough. And rightly so, I think most would agree.
Packham has all the passion of a great man for his subject and the willingness and ability to share what he knows as much as possible. He walks the line between not thinking anything and not giving his audience as much interest as Attenborough does.
Evolution takes one animal as an event and explores the other side of it and the evolutionary journey it represents. Packham opens with elephants and, in particular, their skies; a good example of the opportunity to choose that has helped us in different ways to go from the original soup, to the land (and sometimes back to the water – dolphins are explored in the fourth part) or the space (and, without the wisdom of people, in Teslas and pants).
In Kenya, we look at the quadrillion or so cells that make up an African elephant running around a hole, before CGI brings us 4.2bn years to Luca (the last common ancestor) – the single-celled creature that was the father of all life on Earth as we know it. Not that it was perfect: over the generations, changes creep in. Others encourage cells to absorb sunlight and convert energy. This leads, over time – a lot of time, but one thing that the Earth has is time – to plants. Some have the ability to eat decaying matter and give us fungi. And some evolve into myriads of organisms that continue to grow in size and complexity into tiny aquatic worms, then leggy larvae and proto-lungs, then dinosaurs and mammals.
A meteorite strike wipes out the dinosaurs and one of the mammals becomes the ancestor of the elephant. They are small and hairy at the moment, but the next 66m years allow many changes to take place, and useful things shape the future: intestines that allow plants to decompose; different types of teeth; and, at one time, a long nose which proved the advantage of having a short nose as much as anything else. And what Kipling would say, is how the elephant got its trunk.
Bats are featured in the third episode (the second episode, the ostrich, was not available for review) to show the importance of bums to all of us. Later, the dolphins become an example of wise choice, while the horses talk about the development of movement and how life is better when you can go to food instead of waiting, buried under the sea, for it to come to you.
The series is based on science – Packham always has a fossil, or an example of a modern creature that does something similar to the past, or is trying to illustrate a point. But the play is equally careful to avoid the idea that evolution is a means to an end, not a choice. In any case, Packham is not afraid to express feelings of wonder and the seemingly miraculous nature of it all.
You should, for example, be surprised by the difference in the arrival of retroviruses created in our world – attacking the placoderm (historical fish), which then passed the DNA virus to its children, which added myelin sheaths to create nerve cells for the first time, and increased the computing power of everything. Bodies and brains became faster and better connected until, at some point, as Packham says: “Thinking begins.” And now some people’s brains are big enough to create and put together programs to tell us all about it. Sounds like a good day to have any sort of neocortex, I must say.
Evolution is television that manages something very beautiful: it makes you feel like a kid again. Excited by the new, shocking, shocking information about the best things, feeling a touch of curiosity ignited inside you and wishing you were young again – you can follow all these new paths of enlightenment that open up at any time. And if you and the child is looking? Like Attenborough, Packham was a passionate young man. There will be young spectators whose flames of curiosity will be ignited and never extinguished. What a wonderful world.
