And so we bid farewell to another very good BBC wildlife series. Evolution is a tricky subject as the motion picture camera hasn’t been around for much of Earth’s history and so there is a lot of leaning on CGI (which wouldn’t have been available in David Attenborough’s days) and fossils. But ending up with a well-loved vertebrate, wearing the same T-shirt every episode, in some far-flung location and some real present day charming vertebrates (mostly mammals) is a good way to do it. Programmes ended with smiling scientists recapping some of the points to persuade us that this wasn’t just a naturalist in a T-shirt making it all up.
I call this a wildlife series but it could be called a science series with wildlife featuring highly.
We learn (or some of us probably revise) quite a lot about the ‘what’ of evolution over billions of years but less about the ‘how’. There was a little in previous episodes about survival of the fittest, and handing down traits through the genes but maybe that’s because large parts of the world aren’t completely sold on evolution by natural selection even now.
I’d love to see a series which covered the ‘how’ of evolution in quite a bit more detail. How about what genes are and how they code for everything in organisms, how complex structures like the eye evolve gradually, the evolution of sexual reproduction, the evolution of social behaviour and the evolution of altruism? Well, we’ll see. Would Chris be the presenter, or a presenter? I think he’d be good, as this series and the previous one, Earth, and much of the rest of his work has shown. But would he want to do it? What T-shirt would he wear?
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I thought that it is thought that eyes have evolved on more than one occassion. But light sensitive cells appear to be a common starting place, which evolved into pits (capable of detecting light direction) and then onward to eyes.
Reproduction is a bit complex. There are species that do not require a male to reproduce. But they produce live young or lay eggs. Then there’s the fish species that change sex during their life cycle. (I think all these may have featured in previous Beeb productions).
Darwin’s finches. (Bringing birds back into view).
Then there’s speciation. The process of a new species developing. I think the most recent examples include giraffes now being split into separate species (whereas they were considered sub-species or types). If you look and examine the areas where there are populations of the previously identified sub-species you can see that there is little or no overlap in distribution, thus isolated breeding populations which is something that can be part of speciation.
Or that’s my basics. (Corrections accepted).