His superpower has always been speaking his mind \u2013 and his majestic new BBC show aims to shatter our ideas about life itself. The presenter talks mass extinction, spiders who dream and why people get sick of him holding up rocks<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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\u2019 first common ancestor. Known as Luca, it is the indivisible connection between you and your cat, me and an elephant. (That\u2019s an acronym, not poetry, by the way \u2013 Last Universal Common Ancestor, the single-celled organism from 4.2bn years ago that branched into everything that now lives.) \u201cThere is still a physical connection between me and you, and a cell that existed billions of years ago,\u201d he says. \u201cI find that absolutely brilliant.\u201d<\/p>\n
The show seeks to shake up all our preconceptions: \u201cWe 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.\u201d I mean, these aren\u2019t all <\/em>misconceptions \u2013 it is pretty slow, no? \u201cThere would have been billions of years when we just had cells floating in a broth in the sea,\u201d he concedes. \u201cWe looked at it more as the turning points in evolution\u2019s life, the periods when it moved very rapidly.\u201d 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. \u201cI don\u2019t like to use the C word,\u201d Packham says in the opener, watching a tree hyrax that is the improbably close genetic relative of the elephant, \u201cbut they are incredibly cute.\u201d<\/p>\n
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