‘We didn’t evolve heads until we evolved donkeys. I like that’: Chris Packham’s epic ode to evolution | TV

IIt’s impossible to meet Chris Packham without being in a good mood. This is largely due to his infectious enthusiasm for the natural world, but on this occasion it might as well have been his canary yellow polo shirt and hair standing up as if electrified. His new five-part book, Evolution, tells the story of the single cell that represents the first common ancestor of all living things. Known as Luka, he is the indivisible link between you and your cat, and me and the elephant. (That’s an acronym, not poetry, by the way — the last universal ancestor, the single-celled organism 4.2 billion years ago that branched off into everything that lives now.) “There is still a physical connection between you and me, and a cell that has been around for billions of years,” he says. “I find that absolutely fascinating.”

The show seeks to change all our preconceptions: “We tend to stop at GCSEs and are left with a legacy of thinking that evolution is too slow, we’re the be-all and end-all of it, its story is over.” I mean this isn’t it everyone Misconceptions – It’s too slow, right? “It could have been billions of years ago when we had cells floating in a broth in the sea,” he admits. “We looked at them as turning points in evolutionary life, periods when it moved very quickly.” Evolution tells the story of different processes across particular animals. He explains breathing through an elephant, reproducing through an ostrich, eating through a bat, thinking through a dolphin, and running through a horse. “I don’t like using the C word,” Packham says in the editorial, eyeing a hyrax tree that is likely a close genetic relative of the elephant, “but it’s incredibly cute.”

This is what first strikes you about Packham’s storytelling: whenever he has a choice between something nice and something goopy, he will always and shamelessly turn gooey. “I don’t hate kindness, but I prefer dogs to puppies,” he says. This doesn’t make sense. “I don’t hate puppies! I don’t understand big eyes or big ears. To me, this is a developmental stage that leads to where you’re supposed to go.”

At one point, I was surprised by Packham’s choices on the show. Halfway between the hyrax, which descends from an ancestor that survived an asteroid strike by being small, and the elephant comes the long-extinct palaeomastodon, which, depicted via computer-generated imagery, is very elegant, like a pocket-sized hippopotamus. I didn’t expect him to come up with computers, to tell a story of evolution that is a few billion years ahead of technology, but it’s practical. “I can get very romantically excited about fossils, and some of them are wonderfully beautiful, but I think for the public, there’s a limit to the number of times I can hold up a piece of rock and say ‘really cool’.”

Moreover, he is not a Luddite. “Human evolution is not just about physiology. Our cultural evolution – whether it is the invention of the combustion engine or artificial intelligence – will have a profound impact on our species.”

Packham wants us to ask questions that are childish and not childish. “We become lazy, we stop seeing things with wonder, and this reduces our ability to ask basic questions. How did the elephant get a trunk? Why does it have a trunk? Why don’t I have a trunk?”

The story of sustenance focuses on bats because they are the hungriest animal relative to their weight—they need to consume their body weight in insects every day. But it begins with the first method of feeding, when there was only “a chamber into which the food enters and is digested, and the animals had to digest it through the same opening, which is very inefficient.” (I already knew this from the delightful story of the hedgehog, as my first husband is a geologist—a disc-shaped creature that started out with an adjacent mouth/anus, and then separated over centuries, so you can date your geological record from how far a hedgehog’s mouth is from its backside.)

To understand the complexity of this, you’ll need a bat: “Once you have a mouth and an anus, you want your sensory organs to be close to your mouth, and if you want your sensory organs to function optimally, you want the brain to be as close to those as possible, so you get a head. We didn’t develop heads until we developed butts. I quite like that.”

Packham’s development as a broadcaster has been remarkable. He has the classic Attenborough combination of wanting to disappear into the grandeur of nature, while connecting with the rest of us. But over the years, his innate candor led him to seem more extreme than ever. Whether speaking broadly about the climate crisis, or specifically about chickens, he has refused to make his passion palatable by watering down its political implications. If there’s a common conceptual line from Springwatch to Evolution, it’s that every creature, every living being, is more intelligent than you ever thought possible. “Swallows choose white feathers to put in their nests because a type of bacteria breaks them down, which produces a substance that negatively impacts the microbes in the nest, and they also have a higher hatching and growth rate. I mean, it’s absolutely amazing that those little birds wandering into those nests are actively choosing white feathers instead of colorful feathers.”

Evolution (the symptom, not the phenomenon) is not on a mission to put humanity back in place, but that is the inevitable result when you really stop thinking about the ostrich egg. If we are the logical endpoint of the evolutionary journey, how did we arrive at a mode of reproduction that is more risky and less elegant than laying an egg? “We’ve always put ourselves on the pedestal of being the smartest. But we’ve learned a lot recently. Some reef fish even have a theory of mind: they can recognize themselves as individuals, and thus recognize others as individuals. Think of the mirror test – the ability to recognize yourself in a mirror. We knew that elephants could do it, that chimpanzees could do it and dolphins. But now we’re starting to see that other animals can. Spiders can dream. So they clearly have a subconscious, and they activate that subconscious based on Their conscious mind input.

At the end of last year, the National Emergency Briefing saw 10 experts explain to 1,200 MPs and business leaders what climate breakdown would mean for the UK’s health, food, national security and economy. The resulting film, People’s Emergency Briefing, hosted by Packham and filmed Gogglebox style with national treasures like Jennifer Saunders responding, has since been shown, but only in person. It’s not online. Some of the facts are grimly familiar – one in six UK species is at risk of extinction – and some examine familiar terms, such as ecosystem collapse, in detailed and literal ways (what does that mean for growing food?), which give it the pace of the disaster movie it is. This is part of Packham’s long-standing defense of the natural world against the human threat, but his outlook is always hopeful.

“Ninety-nine percent of all the creatures that have ever lived on Earth are extinct—it’s a very important part of evolution. If they were all still there, there wouldn’t be room for us. Evolution is constant, a rollercoaster, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Whatever we throw at the world, the perseverance of life runs deep, and no matter how badly we think we might be able to harm this planet, we won’t annihilate life. It will evolve again to become every bit of it. Diverse and beautiful as it was before we started mixing it, It’s humble, but reassuring.

That doesn’t mean he lets anyone off the hook. “What we are doing is not a mass extinction event, it is a genocide event. We are consciously aware of the fact that we are destroying life. Given our creativity, our imagination, our intelligence, etc., do we want this extermination on our conscience? I don’t think we do.” What he won’t agree with is the idea that humans are a scourge on Earth: “I hear environmentalists saying if we were all wiped out by a pandemic, life would be so beautiful. It’s unrealistic, improbable and a bit insulting. Yes, we’ve had an impact on the planet, but we’ve done wonderful things. We’re a wonderful organism. We’ve invented harmful things and practices, but we have to see that as part of the evolutionary process.” Like everything else.”

The series ends with a soliloquy in which he calls for “the evolution of human hope. It’s not a physiological thing, it’s a way we think about ourselves so that we can live more harmoniously on this planet. And it’s all possible.”

Speaking for himself, all it takes is a yew tree near his house. “It’s 2,000 years old. I go and sit under it, and within minutes, I feel completely unimportant. Chris Packham is not an important living being. And there’s probably something like that in this series. He’s saying it’s not about all of us, it’s about life. Humans are just part of it, and collectively, it’s so beautiful.”

Evolution begins in July 13 9pm on BBC Two.