{"id":690347,"date":"2026-07-14T02:13:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T02:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/690347\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T02:13:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T02:13:09","slug":"evolution-review-with-this-tv-miracle-david-attenboroughs-successor-is-well-and-truly-crowned-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/690347\/","title":{"rendered":"Evolution review \u2013 with this TV miracle, David Attenborough\u2019s successor is well and truly crowned | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

Evolution is a coronation. With this new, five-part BBC nature documentary, the presenter Chris Packham<\/a> is effectively crowned the successor to David Attenborough. And a worthy one, I\u00a0think\u00a0most would agree.<\/p>\n

Packham has all the great man\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 dolphins are examined in episode four) or into the air (and, in the absurd case of humans, into Teslas and trousers).<\/p>\n

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\u00a0years to Luca (last universal common ancestor)\u00a0\u2013 a single-cell organism that was the progenitor of all life\u00a0on Earth as we know it. Not that it was perfect: over\u00a0the generations, mutations creep in. Some\u00a0encourage cells to capture sunlight and convert\u00a0that to energy.\u00a0These give rise, over time\u00a0\u2013 so\u00a0much time, but the one thing the young Earth has is time \u2013 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\u00a0mammals.<\/p>\n

Awesome appendage \u2026 Packham and an elephant. Photograph: BBC Studios\/Tom Hayward<\/p>\n

A meteorite strike wipes out the dinosaurs and one of the mammals becomes the elephant\u2019s ancestor. They\u00a0are small and furry at this point, but the next 66m\u00a0years 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\u00a0some point, a longer nose that proved an advantage\u00a0over having a shorter nose like everything else. And that, whatever Kipling says, is how the elephant got its trunk.<\/p>\n

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,\u00a0dolphins become an example of selecting\u00a0for intelligence, while horses tell the story\u00a0of\u00a0the development of movement and how much\u00a0better life\u00a0becomes when you can take yourself\u00a0to food rather\u00a0than waiting, rooted to an ocean\u00a0floor, for it to\u00a0come to you.<\/p>\n

The series is grounded in science \u2013 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\u00a0that evolution is a method of design\u00a0working towards a goal, rather than a selection\u00a0process. Either way, Packham is never afraid to express a sense of wonder at the miraculous-seeming nature of it all.<\/p>\n

You really should, for example, be awed at the difference the advent of retroviruses made to our world\u00a0\u2013 invading a placoderm (a prehistoric fish), which\u00a0then 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\u00a0of everything. Bodies and brains became faster\u00a0and better connected until, at some point, as Packham puts it: \u201cThinking begins.\u201d And now some\u00a0people\u2019s 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\u00a0neocortex, I must say.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0touchpaper of curiosity being lit inside you and wishing you were young again \u2013 able to follow all these\u00a0new avenues of exploration opening up at every turn. And if you are a child watching? Like\u00a0Attenborough, Packham was a boy\u00a0obsessed.\u00a0There will be youngsters watching whose flames of curiosity will be ignited and never go\u00a0out. What a wonderful world.<\/p>\n

Evolution airs on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer in the UK, with any overseas broadcasts yet to be announced.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Evolution is a coronation. With this new, five-part BBC nature documentary, the presenter Chris Packham is effectively crowned…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":690348,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-690347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/690348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}