Chris Packham is fronting a new five-part BBC series, Evolution, which sets out to overturn common misconceptions about how life develops. Speaking to the Guardian's Zoe Williams, the naturalist explains that the show traces every living thing back to "Luca" (the Last Universal Common Ancestor), a single-celled organism from 4.2bn years ago, and argues that evolution is neither uniformly slow nor a finished story with humans as its endpoint. It matters as another example of Packham's increasingly outspoken, wonder-driven broadcasting, which fuses Attenborough-style reverence for nature with a willingness to press awkward questions.

Each episode explains a biological process through a particular animal: breathing via the elephant, reproduction via the ostrich, eating via the bat, thinking via the dolphin and running via the horse. Packham highlights vivid details — the bat must eat its own bodyweight in insects daily, and heads evolved only after animals developed a separate mouth and anus, clustering sensory organs and the brain near the mouth. He defends using AI-generated imagery of extinct creatures such as the palaeomastodon to avoid endlessly "holding up a piece of rock", and stresses that cultural evolution, from the combustion engine to AI, will profoundly shape our species. His trademark preference for the slimy over the cute, and his refusal to soften the politics around issues like the climate crisis and hen harriers, run throughout.