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It’s impossible to meet Chris Packham without getting into a good mood. This is largely down to his contagious enthusiasm for the natural world, but on this occasion may also be his canary yellow polo shirt and stand-up-as-if-electrocuted hair. His new five-parter, Evolution, tells the story of the single cell that is all living things’ first common ancestor. Known as Luca, it is the indivisible connection between you and your cat, me and an elephant. (That’s an acronym, not poetry, by the way – Last Universal Common Ancestor, the single-celled organism from 4.2bn years ago that branched into everything that now lives.) “There is still a physical connection between me and you, and a cell that existed billions of years ago,” he says. “I find that absolutely brilliant.”
The show seeks to shake up all our preconceptions: “We tend to stop at GCSE and are left with a legacy of thinking that evolution is laboriously slow, we are its be all and end all, and its story is over.” I mean, these aren’t all misconceptions – it is pretty slow, no? “There would have been billions of years when we just had cells floating in a broth in the sea,” he concedes. “We looked at it more as the turning points in evolution’s life, the periods when it moved very rapidly.” Evolution tells the story of different processes via specific animals. It explains breathing through the elephant, reproducing through the ostrich, eating through the bat, thinking through the dolphin, and running through the horse. “I don’t like to use the C word,” Packham says in the opener, watching a tree hyrax that is the improbably close genetic relative of the elephant, “but they are incredibly cute.”
That is what strikes you first about Packham’s storytelling: whenever he has a choice between a cute thing and a slimy thing, he will invariably and unashamedly go slimy. “I’m not averse to cute,” he says, “but I prefer dogs to puppies.” This is nonsensical. “I don’t dislike puppies! I just don’t get the big eye, big ear thing. For me, that’s a developmental stage, leading to where it’s meant to get.”
At one point, I’m surprised by Packham’s choices in the show. Partway between the hyrax, which dodged the asteroid strike by being small, and the elephant comes the long-extinct palaeomastodon, shown in an AI-generated image, which is extremely dinky, like a pocket-size hippo. I didn’t expect him to bring in computers, to tell a story of evolution that outsmarts tech and predates it by a few billion years, but he’s pragmatic. “I can get very romantically excited about a fossil, and some of them are exquisitely beautiful, but I think that for the audience, there’s a limit to how many times I can hold up a piece of rock and say ‘truly remarkable’.”
Besides, he’s not a luddite. “Human evolution is not just about the physiology. ur cultural evolution – whether the invention of the combustion engine or AI – will have a profound effect on our species.”
Packham wants us to ask questions that are childish, not childlike. “We get lazy, we stop seeing things with wonder, and it reduces our capacity to ask the fundamental questions. How did an elephant get a trunk? Why has it got a trunk? Why haven’t I got a trunk?”
The story of sustenance focuses on the bat as it’s the animal that, weight-for-weight, is the hungriest – it needs to consume its own bodyweight in insects every day. But it starts at the earliest mode of feeding, when there was “just a chamber, food went in, got digested, animals had to egest it through the same hole, highly inefficient”. (I actually knew this from the delightful story of the echinoid, as my first husband is a geologist – a disc-shaped creature that started off with mouth/anus adjacent, then they separated over centuries, so you can date your geological record from how far the echinoid’s mouth is from its butthole.)
To grasp the complexity of this, though, you’ll need a bat: “as soon as you’ve got a mouth and an anus, you want your sensory organs near your mouth, and if you want your sensory organs to be optimally operating, you want the brain as close as possible to those, so basically you get a head. We didn’t evolve heads until we’d evolved an arse. I quite like that.”
Packham’s own evolution as a broadcaster has been fascinating. He has that classic Attenborough mix of wanting to disappear into the majesty of nature, while communicating with the rest of us. But over the years, his instinctive straightforwardness has led him to sound ever more radical. Whether talking broadly about the climate crisis, or specifically about hen harriers, he has refused to make his passion palatable by watering down its political implications. If there’s a conceptual throughline from Springwatch to Evolution, it’s that every creature, every organism, is smarter than you thought possible. “Swallows choose white feathers to put in their nests because a type of bacteria breaks them down, which produces a substance which impacts negatively on microbes in the nest, and they have a higher hatching and fledging rate. I mean, it’s just astonishing that those little birds flitting around making those nests are actively choosing white feathers over coloured feathers.”
Evolution (the show, not the phenomenon) is not on a mission to put humankind back in its place, but that’s the inevitable result when you really stop to think about an ostrich egg. If we were the logical endpoint of the evolutionary journey, how did we land upon a mode of reproduction so much riskier and less elegant than laying an egg? “We’ve always put ourselves on the pedestal of being the brightest. But we’ve learned so much recently. Even some reef fish have theory of mind: they can recognise themselves as individuals, and therefore they know others as individuals. Think of the mirror test – being able to recognise yourself in a mirror. We knew that elephants could do it, that chimpanzees could do it and dolphins. But now we’re beginning to see that other animals can. Spiders can dream. So obviously they have a subconscious, and they’re activating that subconscious based upon the input of their conscious mind.”
At the end of last year, a National Emergency Briefing saw 10 experts explain to 1,200 MPs and business leaders what climate breakdown would mean for health, food, national security and the economy in the UK. The resulting film, The People’s Emergency Briefing, hosted by Packham and filmed Gogglebox-style with national treasures such as Jennifer Saunders responding, has been showing since, but only in-person; it isn’t online. Some of the facts have a grim familiarity – one in six species in the UK is at risk of extinction – and some examine familiar terms, such as ecosystem collapse, in granular, literal ways (what would that mean for growing food?), that give it the pace of the disaster movie it is. This is part of Packham’s long-term advocacy for the natural world against anthropogenic threat, but his outlook is always hopeful.
“Ninety-nine per cent of all the things that have ever lived on Earth are extinct – it’s a very important part of evolution. If they were all still here, there wouldn’t be space for us. Evolution is ongoing, a rollercoaster, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Whatever we throw at the world, life’s tenacity is profound, and no matter how badly we think we might be able to damage this planet, we will not exterminate life. It will re-evolve to be every bit as diverse and as beautiful as it was before we started mixing it up. It’s humbling, but it’s reassuring.”
That doesn’t mean he lets anyone off the hook. “What we’re doing is not a mass extinction event, it’s a mass extermination event. We are consciously aware of the fact that we are destroying life. Given our creativity, our imagination, our intelligence and so forth, do we want that extermination on our conscience? I don’t think that we do.” What he won’t subscribe to is the idea of humans as a scourge on Earth: “I hear environmentalists say if we were all wiped out by a pandemic, life would be so beautiful. It’s such an unrealistic and improbable and slightly degrading thing to say. Yes, we’ve had an impact on the planet, but we’ve done remarkable things. We are a remarkable organism. We’ve invented things and practices which are damaging, but we have to consider that as much a part of the evolutionary process as everything else.”
The series ends with a soliloquy he wrote which calls for “an evolution of human hope. It’s not a physiological thing, it’s a way that we think about ourselves so we can live more harmoniously on this planet. And all of that is 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 totally inconsequential. Chris Packham is not an important organism. And maybe there’s a semblance of that in this series. It says that it’s not all about us, it’s about life. Humans are just a part of it and, collectively, it’s extraordinarily beautiful.”
Evolution begins on 13 July at 9pm on BBC Two.
