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Meit is impossible to meet Chris Packham without having a positive attitude. This is mainly due to his widespread interest in nature, but this time it could also be his bright yellow shirt and standing-up-as-electric hair. His new five-part series, Evolution, tells the story of the single cell that is the first ancestor of all life. Known as Luca, he is the invisible connection between you and your cat, me and the elephant. (That’s an acronym, not a poem, by the way – the Last Universal Common Ancestor, a single-celled organism from 4.2bn years ago that merged into everything that exists now.) “There is a physical connection between you and me, and a cell that existed billions of years ago,” he says. “I think it’s great.”
The show aims to disrupt all our thinking: “We tend to stop at GCSE and are left with a legacy of thinking that evolution is slow, we are the be all and end all, and the story is over.” I mean, this is not everything misconception – it’s too late, isn’t it? “It would have been billions of years before we just had cells floating in broth in the ocean,” he admits. “We saw it as an evolutionary life change, a time that moved very quickly.” Evolution tells the story of different ways through particular animals. It explains breathing through elephants, reproduction through ostriches, eating through bats, thinking through dolphins, and running through horses. “I don’t like to use the C word,” says Packham in the opening remarks, looking at a hyrax tree that is the elephant’s closest relative, “but it’s amazingly beautiful.”
This is the first thing that strikes you about Packham’s story: whenever he has a choice between something beautiful and thin, he always and unashamedly leans. “I don’t hate beauty,” he says, “but I love dogs more than dogs.” This is nonsense. “I don’t hate puppies!
At times, I wonder about Packham’s choices in the show. In between the hyrax, which avoided an asteroid strike by being small, and the elephant comes the long-extinct palaeomastodon, shown in an AI-generated image, which is very shiny, like a growing hippopotamus in a pocket. I didn’t expect them to bring in computers, tell an evolutionary story that transcends technology and predicts billions of years in advance, but it’s brilliant. “I can have a lot of fun with fossils, and some of them are very beautiful, but I think for the audience, there’s a limit to how many times I can pick up a rock and say ‘really amazing’.”
Also, he is not a luddite. “Human evolution is not just about the physical. The evolution of our culture – whether it’s the invention of the combustion engine or AI – will have a profound effect on our species.”
Packham wants us to ask childish questions, not like children. We become lazy, we stop seeing things in wonder, and it prevents us from asking the most important questions: How did the Elephant get its trunk, why does it have a trunk?
The food story focuses on the bat because it is the animal that, for its weight, is the most hungry – it needs to eat its insect-infested body every day. But it starts from the past feeding time, when there was “only a room, the food goes in, it is digested, the animals have to put it in the same hole, which is not enough”. (I actually knew this from an interesting echinoid story, as my first husband is a geologist – a disk-shaped creature that started with a mouth / anus close together, then they separated for hundreds of years, so you can tell your geological history from a distance with the mouth of an echinoid from its surface.)
To understand the complexity of this, you will need bats: “When you take your mouth and anus, you want your hearing organs to be close to your mouth, and if you want your hearing organs to work well, you want the brain to be very close to them, so you get a head. We didn’t change the heads until we changed.
Packham’s transition as a broadcaster has been interesting. He has that classic Attenborough blend of wanting to get lost in the majesty of nature, while speaking to all of us. But over the years, his innate straightness has made him sound over the top. Whether he talks more about the climate crisis, or more specifically about chickens destroying chickens, he has refused to sweeten his appetite by downplaying his political issues. If there’s a carryover idea from Springwatch to Evolution, it’s that every creature, every living thing, is smarter than you think. These birds choose white feathers to put in their nests because they are broken down by insects, which release a substance that disrupts the nest’s pathogens, and they hatch and breed more.
Evolution (a demonstration, not a phenomenon) is not about restoring humanity to its place, but it is the inevitable result when you stop to think about an ostrich egg. If we were the logical end of the evolutionary journey, how did we arrive at a method of reproduction that is less dangerous and less invasive than egg laying? “We’ve always put ourselves in a very visible position. But we’ve learned a lot recently. Even some sea fish have a sense of mind: they can recognize themselves as individuals, so they know others as humans.” Think of the mirror experiment – being able to recognize yourself in the mirror. We knew that elephants could do it, that monkeys could do it with dolphins. conscience, and they are creating that conscience based on the thoughts of their mind.”
At the end of last year, the National Emergency Briefing saw 10 experts explain to 1,200 MPs and business leaders what climate change could mean for health, food, national security and the UK economy. In this movie, Summary of People’s Emergencyhosted by Packham and filming Gogglebox style is a national treasure as Jennifer Saunders responds, has been to show sincebut in man; it is not online. Some of the most famous ones are well-known – one in six species in the UK is at risk of extinction – and others see familiar words, such as the collapse of the environment, in a piecemeal, literal way (what does it mean to grow food?), which gives it the speed of a disaster movie. This is part of Packham’s long-term advocacy of nature against anthropogenic threat, but his views are always optimistic.
“Ninety-nine percent of the things that have ever existed on Earth are extinct—it’s a very important part of evolution.” If all were there, there would be no room for us. Evolution continues, a rollercoaster, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Whatever we throw into the world, the stability of life is great, and no matter how much we try, we cannot destroy life. change it back to being as colorful and beautiful as it was before we started mixing it is humbling, but inspiring.
That doesn’t mean they let anyone off the hook. “What we are doing is not the extinction of many people, but it is destroying many people. What they cannot agree with is the idea of people as a plague on the Earth: “I hear environmentalists saying that if we were all eradicated from the plague, life would be very beautiful. It’s a ridiculous and impossible and slightly disgusting thing to say. Yes, we have touched the world, but we have done amazing things. but we must consider that it is as much a part of evolution as anything else. “
These stories end with a story he wrote as a soliloquy that wants “people’s expectations to change.” It’s not about our physical condition, it’s about how we think about ourselves to live in harmony in this world, and all of this is possible.
Speaking for himself, all he needs is a yew tree near his house. “It’s 2,000 years old. I go to sit down and, in a few minutes, I feel insignificant. Chris Packham is not the most important thing. And maybe there are parallels in this series. He says that it’s not all about us, but life.
Evolution begins 13 July at 9pm on BBC Two.
