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2 hours ago
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Evolution is a coronation. With this new, five-part BBC nature documentary, the presenter Chris Packham is effectively crowned the successor to David Attenborough. And a worthy one, I think most would agree.
Packham has all the great man’s passion for his subject and the willingness and ability to share his knowledge as accessibly as possible. He treads the line between assuming nothing and not infantilising his audience as nimbly as Attenborough does.
Evolution takes one animal an episode and delves into a particular aspect of it and the evolutionary journey it represents. Packham opens with elephants and, specifically, their trunks; a perfect example of a selection advantage that has, in various ways, helped us all move out of the primordial soup, on to land (and sometimes back into water – dolphins are examined in episode four) or into the air (and, in the absurd case of humans, into Teslas and trousers).
In Kenya, we watch the quadrillion or so cells that comprise an African savanna elephant frolicking around a watering hole, before CGI takes us back 4.2bn years to Luca (last universal common ancestor) – a single-cell organism that was the progenitor of all life on Earth as we know it. Not that it was perfect: over the generations, mutations creep in. Some encourage cells to capture sunlight and convert that to energy. These give rise, over time – so much time, but the one thing the young Earth has is time – to plants. Some develop the capacity to feed on decay and give us fungi. And some become multicellular life forms that keep growing in size and complexity and become tiny aquatic worms, then worms with limbs and proto-lungs, then dinosaurs and mammals.
A meteorite strike wipes out the dinosaurs and one of the mammals becomes the elephant’s ancestor. They are small and furry at this point, but the next 66m years allow more mutations to occur, and the useful ones shape the future: guts that allow the digestion of plants; different kinds of teeth; and, at some point, a longer nose that proved an advantage over having a shorter nose like everything else. And that, whatever Kipling says, is how the elephant got its trunk.
Bats are featured in episode three (episode two, about ostriches, was not available for review) to illustrate the importance of bums to us all. Thereafter, dolphins become an example of selecting for intelligence, while horses tell the story of the development of movement and how much better life becomes when you can take yourself to food rather than waiting, rooted to an ocean floor, for it to come to you.
The series is grounded in science – Packham always has a fossil on hand, or an example of a modern creature that does something similar to an old one, or an experiment demonstrating a particular principle. But the show is equally careful to avoid the suggestion that evolution is a method of design working towards a goal, rather than a selection process. Either way, Packham is never afraid to express a sense of wonder at the miraculous-seeming nature of it all.
You really should, for example, be awed at the difference the advent of retroviruses made to our world – invading a placoderm (a prehistoric fish), which then passed on the viral DNA to its offspring, where it added myelin sheaths to developing nerve cells for the first time, increasing the computing power of everything. Bodies and brains became faster and better connected until, at some point, as Packham puts it: “Thinking begins.” And now some people’s brains are big enough to work out how and put together programmes to tell the rest of us about it all. It feels like a great day to have any kind of neocortex, I must say.
Evolution is television that manages that most beautiful thing: it makes you feel like a child again. Happily bombarded with new information, mesmerised, boggling at fantastic facts, feeling the touchpaper of curiosity being lit inside you and wishing you were young again – able to follow all these new avenues of exploration opening up at every turn. And if you are a child watching? Like Attenborough, Packham was a boy obsessed. There will be youngsters watching whose flames of curiosity will be ignited and never go out. What a wonderful world.
