Amanda Scott

hey people welcome to accidental gods to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us

I'm Amanda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility.

And we are recording this in December, ahead, we believe, of putting it out early in the new year.

So, happy new year, in this kind of weird time flip that we're doing.

And this is really appropriate for the topic today, because one of the many things that Professor David Farrier explores in his book Nature's Genius is

is how time is not always considered to be linear by other cultures, probably not by other species, and certainly not by the web of life.

So let's take a step back and have a look.

And this is important because we, that is we humanity, we the whole of the human species, but particularly our culture, are now changing every facet of life on Earth and are the main drivers for evolutionary change.

combination of a warming world, an acidifying world, the chaos of toxic overspill and everything that we just dump into the environment is pushing either extinction or adaptation in every species on earth including us.

And so it's good to have a really clear-eyed look at this.

And this is what Nature's Genius does.

The subtitle is Evolutions Lessons for a Changing Planet.

And those lessons are both good and bad.

In the conversation that follows, you'll hear David say several times that we cannot be complacent.

Yes, many species are adapting and evolving very fast.

to the horrors that we are imposing on them.

But not everything is.

We are losing species at a terrifying rate, and there are probably limits to the adaptations that can happen.

Nonetheless, some of the things that are happening are genuinely fascinating.

I had no idea, for instance, that elephants were evolving without tusks.