Primates of the Caribbean, Science Communication and Perceptions of Evolution - Professor Ben Garrod

Ahead of the Milner Centre for Evolution's Darwin Day lecture 2025, Professor Turi King spoke with Professor Ben Garrod about his career, his involvement in science communication and his passion for all things evolution.

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Hello and welcome. You are listening to a podcast by the Miller Centre for Evolution at
the University of Bath. I'm Professor Turi King, your host, and today I'm talking to Ben Garrod,
professor of evolutionary biology and science engagement at the University of East Anglia.
He's also our Milner Centre for Evolution, Darwin Day lecturer, 2025. I'm going to be talking to
him about his career, his current research and his passion for all things evolution.

(00:29):
So, Ben, we're celebrating Darwin's birthday today, for people who don't know about Darwin,
what did he do and why is he so important?Oh, how long have you got? I mean, he's one of
these guys that everybody knows, but actually the reality of Darwin is very different. He's
not just this old guy with a beard who looks a little bit formal against a Victorian background,

(00:51):
he explored he challenged ideas that were so prevalent at the time. And whereas there are
others who really did push the idea of evolution through natural selection at a much faster pace,
someone like Wallace, for example, who very famously put his idea in at the same time as
Darwin and the story goes that Darwin's was accepted and he was from a very gentlemanly

(01:12):
background and very well-to-do, whereas Wallace was some ne'er do well young guy,
sweating fever off in the tropics somewhere, so it wasn't really listened to.
But actually, what Darwin did, he wasn't the first person to think of evolution. I mean,
even his grandfather, Erasmus, looked at this idea of change in individuals and populations
and obviously species over time. But this concept of theorizing in an academic and testable sense,

(01:38):
that incrementally we change over time. And those little, tiny things, those tweaks,
he didn't say mutations, we didn't know anything about genetics, as obviously as you'll know,
this was a time where he effectively only had 50% of the jigsaw he was trying to piece together. He
realized incrementally, these things are in some capacity chosen or selected for or agreeable to

(02:00):
the point where subsequent generations have a slightly longer neck and a slightly longer neck.
And this idea of passing on something that's beneficial to you as a species, then becomes
uniform across your species, was revolutionary at the time, and it caused real upset between
his wife, first of all, and friends. Richard Owen, famously, who had the kudos with developing

(02:23):
and setting up the natural History Museum was very, very ardently a religious scholar, who
described so many species within palaeontology, defined the very concept of what dinosaurs were,
but still absolutely believed in the creator. And when Darwin challenged this, the story goes,
they fell a bad time. There was a lot of dissing backwards and forwards between Owen and Darwin

(02:46):
So, it's easy for us to look at this and say, yes, we can see evolution all around us,
and most of us accept that as a concept or a scientific theory now. But this was
so fundamentally out there at the time, I don't think we give Darwin that credit.
I think you said something really important because he kind of really changed a world view,
in terms of also like, our place in the natural world. We are no longer like the pinnacle;

(03:12):
we are part of the natural world. And you studied primates for your undergrad,
so this kind of all ties in, I'm guessing.Absolutely. Many religious backgrounds puts
us on that pedestal, as you say, and it's within religious text, there is man has dominion over
nature, and we were created on a separate day to all the other things that were created,
because we're so special. And then when you look at, clearly in a time before social media,

(03:34):
the most scathing thing that you could do to another person was to ridicule them with comics
or cartoons. And they stuck Darwin's face on these troglodyte monkey ape hybrid bodies to say, well,
if he wants to be a monkey, fine, the rest of us aren't. And this sense that he had shaken
that foundation so much that we've been told for generations, well, thousands of years,

(03:57):
that we’re special. Darwin was the first to really comprehensively come out and go,
you’re just a tall, lanky monkey with less hair.So, I'm guessing he had a pretty big impact
on you in terms of your… because you did your PhD on… I love the title of your PhD,
Primates of the Caribbean. Just excellent. So, tell me about that, what were you doing?

(04:18):
So, my undergrad was animal behaviour. My master's was in veterinary biology. And my PhD,
as you said, looked at the genetics and cranial morphology of introduced monkeys into Caribbean
islands. And it was very much a Darwinian concept. I was in the Caribbean doing research for my
master's, I was looking at invasive mongooses and their impact on local native fauna. And it

(04:40):
was while I was there, and I've worked in Africa for years before this, I saw monkeys that had been
taken from Africa, introduced to the Caribbean during the trade, and enslaved peoples and I had
this epiphany, this eureka moment where I said one evening, I can remember so vividly going,
it's almost like these monkeys have been introduced onto these three islands in the

(05:01):
Caribbean and over a really short period of time they've changed. It's just like Darwin's finches,
but with monkeys, and we can tell when they were brought here. And there are such
meticulous reports and oh my God, I'm going to… so came back and as we do within academia, I got
really excited about a niche, tiny project.And before long, very luckily managed to
cobble something together, got funding, and then spent the next several years looking at the early

(05:23):
stages of speciation in an introduced primate. And this idea that evolution takes a long time,
or it happens with small things, or we'll never know those first steps, I hate the phrase missing
link within evolution, but there are so many missing links or parts of the story we don't
know. I thought if I can go back and see whether it's genetic, see whether it's morphological,

(05:44):
see whether there's something going on.And interestingly, each of the three islands,
Nevis, Saint Kitts and Barbados all look different from each other, in terms of the monkeys,
but they all collectively look different from the African progenitors as well. So,
it's a wonderful opportunity to look at a medium sized mammal with a known history in
three islands, using them as a natural laboratory. And of course, the title, it was as you and I do,

(06:07):
we tried to bring in an audience so…Also, I mean, what a great project you got to
be in like, the Caribbean whilst you were doing this. Why didn't I think of this as a project?
I have students who say to me now, oh my God, I wish I could do that. And I say, then find a way,
you are meant to enjoy academia. And I spent long enough in places I didn't
really necessarily want to return for work. I thought, how do I get somewhere nice,

(06:30):
do an amazing project, contribute to science, and actually have some fun along the way?
So, what did you do next? Because you were in Uganda at one point?
So, when I finished my undergraduate, I very luckily bumped into, I mean,
massive hero Jane Goodall. I met her one evening, I was working during my undergrad
years and served her dinner one evening and very long story short, over dinner, serving her soup,

(06:52):
shaking so much and worried that I was going to spill hot soup in the lap of my hero,
she eventually turned around and said, what do you want? You've just been hovering all night.
And I said, I just want some advice. I just want you to give me that nugget of inspiration to help
me on my way. And she looked at me absolutely motionless and silent for about 30 seconds,
and it seemed hours. And she said, right, we'll sort something out, give me your email.

(07:15):
I walked home on cloud nine, I phoned my mum, I was over the moon and then about two days
later I thought, that's just a con, she's never going to phone me back or email me back. That's
what she does to crazy people, clearly. I was obviously triggered something and she's never
going to get back in touch, how smart. And then about a week later, she did get in touch and say,
look, we've got a post on an island sanctuary in the middle of Lake Victoria in Uganda. And would

(07:37):
you like to help us out for a couple of months?I said, oh my God, I'd love to, yes, please.
Amazing the chance to interact and work with chimps. She said you will be hands on. I want
you to be out there to see what's going on. Then a few weeks later, she emailed again and said,
there is an opportunity that's coming up after your stay in the sanctuary, could you do a few
years in the middle of a forest running our oldest and largest mahogany forest in East Africa. It's

(08:02):
a project we haven't really had before that we're now taking over from the Forest Authority. There
are several hundred chimps. They haven't been habituated. Can you do that? Can you do law
enforcement? Can you do community education? Can you help with community engagement and research
and ecotourism? And like any cocky 23, 24-year-old I went yeah, course I can. Not a problem.

(08:22):
I was so out of my depth Turi. I cried on my first week solidly out there because it was so
daunting and it was mud huts, middle of a forest, no water, no electricity, no generator. It was as
rural as I could be, and it was amazing.What an amazing experience though,
once you find your feet, I'm guessing you're kind of looking around going, oh my goodness,

(08:44):
I get to work with chimps. I mean, it's kind of like an evolutionary biologist, kind of, dream.
Absolutely, and it really was. And there was this sense I'd grown up reading the books of Jane and
Dian Fossey and their contemporaries. And this was the thing at the time,
very few people had habituated wild chimps. And by habituation, I mean you spend so long with them,
they go through this phase of, they're terrified of you, and they run away, and you just keep

(09:09):
following them. You keep a distance; you are nice and quiet, you don't engage, you don't
look at them, you never make eye contact. You just write everything down in a little notebook.
And then you'd have to write up everything that night because it was soaked in the middle of a
rainforest, obviously. And several months later they stopped being scared. And then they get
angry because you're just following them all the time. And I remember reading a line in one

(09:30):
of Jane's books years before, going, you just have to hold on to a tree and look down. And I thought,
I can do that, which sound easy with you, and I sat in this nice office, right now,
Turi. But when you've got a bunch of chimps thundering towards you, cupping
their hands to make the ground resonate and their piloerect, the hairs on end and they're screaming,
and you hold onto a sapling, you hold onto that sapling tighter than you could possibly imagine,

(09:50):
and then you hold onto the guy next to you because you don't want him to run, and he doesn’t want you
to run, as you are absolutely fixed to the spot.And you suddenly think you didn't really encompass
that in your book Jane, how terrifying that moment can actually be. And you go through
months of that, months and months and months of, they're called bluff charges. They don't really
feel very bluff base to me. They swerve at the last moment. It might be five, six, seven feet
away from you, but it feels like a whisker away.And then they realize you're not really worth

(10:15):
chasing either. And eventually they just give in, and they just accept that you're just this weird,
lanky ape that's going to follow them for whatever reason. They might as well
not worry about you. They might as well not charge you. You're not food and
you’re not a threat. And then you can get the research, then you can get the behavioural data.
And it can take between nine months and a couple of years. And I've got friends and colleagues

(10:36):
have taken a long time, and some a very short period of time, ours took about a year. And
it was almost overnight. There was one day one of the chimps was a little bit slower than the rest,
turned back, looked on the path and almost said, come on then. Massively
anthropomorphizing what happened there, but it seemed like an acceptance and that was it for us.
But to go through that and to see that and to have that experience where you're the first

(10:59):
person to see culture in that community, must be what it's like for anthropologists working
with different communities around the world. Whether you're working with modern communities,
looking at childhood development right through to some tribes we still haven't contacted, there's
that sense of working with the people, working with the community, working with a cultured,
sentient group of beings. Did mine hunt? What culture do they have? Do they nut crack and

(11:23):
how do they not crack? And who led them?I can honestly, quite happily talk to you
for days about just the things anecdotally we saw within our chimps. They adopted monkeys and we had
a blue monkey, for example, that lived completely harmoniously with my chimps. Now 200 k away that
was the chimp’s favourite food in a different forest block. Mine sat with my chimps for years,

(11:43):
and they would play, and they would bite and chase. So, seeing that for the very first time,
this was a time when you couldn't just do an anecdotal paper. No one cared. I'd need
a sample size of hundreds of blue monkeys. So, it was just very much me seeing this.
And it felt really self-indulgent in so many ways and so privileged and yet on the cusp of learning
something about a new group of people. And they’re not human people, but they are still very much

(12:06):
people in my mind. It was incredible.Yeah. And that anthropomorphizing,
I can completely get that, because even now, if I watch programmes about primates,
and when I was learning about primates when I was in my undergraduate, you can't help but
see how close we are to them in so many ways. And it sounds like, what an amazing experience.
It was amazing in ways I hadn't anticipated. And very often I'll say to my students who wants

(12:29):
to work with animals? Who wants to work in the wild? Who wants to do conservation? And clearly
a lot of hands go up and you say, who wants to work with people? And far fewer hands go up.
And you have to say, look, in biology, it's working with people first, whether it's colleagues
in a lab or whether it's government, or whether it's people hunting the species or trying to save,
or whether it's tourists or people on TikTok who are exposing the animals you want to save

(12:50):
in a way that it just misrepresents them. You predominantly work with people and the animals,
the species are secondary, and it really taught me a lot about how you have to engage
in a way you don't necessarily want to sometimes, and I think even that sort of work really
showcased working with different stakeholders in a project where we all wanted different things. I
was one of the few people who wanted to save the chimps for the benefit of the chimps.

(13:13):
The chimps ate the same food local people did; they would trash their communities. They were
dangerous. They were in the way of preventing people earning money by hunting in the forests,
and all these things. And you have to work in different aspects to try
and incorporate all the different senses and feelings and needs in an environment
like that. And it was tough, yeah, really tough.The one thing I will say about anthropomorphism

(13:35):
is I can remember probably the same as you being taught, it's the cardinal sin in the
sciences. Never assume that thing might be feeling something. And I don't know
whether I'm a terrible biologist now that I'm a professor or not, or I forgotten what I was
taught when I was younger, I think that's rubbish.The more I learn about animals, the less certain
I am, entirely with regards to that, and I think it's naive to assume my dog doesn't

(13:59):
miss me, or he isn't happy when I come home or isn't capable of deceiving someone in order to
get a treat. And we actually know this, and we have lots of evidence, the more we look,
we see that animals are deceptive, they have culture, they can possess theory of mind,
all these wonderful ideas. So, I'm not as strict on my students with anthropomorphism as
what my supervisors were with me. I think that's something we can afford to relax a little bit on.

(14:21):
So, what on earth brought you back here then? What brought you back to the UK?
Oh, I survived a few years without too many traumas and then had a series of
unfortunate events, let's call them. I had some volunteers accidentally burnt my camp down.
Oh!And we had a problem with lions.
When I say a problem, it's a real problem, about as bad as you can get with lions. And then sadly,

(14:42):
eventually I had quite a bad accident and broke my back out there, all in the space of six weeks. So,
I don't believe in fate, and I don't believe in deterministic luck, but I suddenly thought…
You wanna know what…Yep, yep. I need to get out of here. So,
I had to come back to UK physically to heal for a while, and it was at a time when I'd gotten as
far as I could with that particular project, and the real sense of success for me in any project

(15:06):
is if I die tomorrow, the project carries on.Yes, I hope they're upset for a day or two,
and I hope there's a drink in my name, but they should carry on. If the whole thing
crumbles because one person's gone, I’ve failed or you’ve failed, or whoever is in charge has
failed with that. And I think that works in academia and conservation and a lot of stuff
that we should be doing, but we don't because we put too much stock in ourselves, sadly.

(15:27):
So my idea was to set up a team out there and capacity build them and send them for training,
and we developed protocols and I just got to the point where, amazingly, I didn't know who I
was going to pick, but this wonderful woman called Souder, who was one of our trail cutter and forest
guides, became the senior manager of one of the largest conservation projects for chimps in East
Africa. And it's amazing that she was able to step up and she could step up. And we took the time

(15:51):
to indulge, what does she need? And how does she want to do this? And what can she do? What can't
you do? She had a family and all these things, and there was a real sense of working together
to see what they needed for their project.But I came home and ended up teaching in a
high school for a year, bizarrely. I bumped into one of my old school teachers on the
train with my stick that I was walking around on, and after discussing what had happened,

(16:14):
I somehow got a job at a high school, enjoyed it, but the moment I was well enough, I was gone again
and I ended up in Asia for a couple of years working with orangutans, the same sort of work.
And I always wanted to be an academic. I always wanted to do my PhD and have the Garrod lab.
That would have been the pinnacle for me, and I really was aiming towards that, and that was my
Everest that I needed to conquer. And clearly, you know the end of this, I don’t have a Garrod lab,

(16:37):
and I'm very grateful that I don't, actually. But after a couple of years in Indonesia, I came back
to the UK and did my veterinary masters, then start putting some ideas together for my PhD.
But by the end of my PhD, I realized I'm not a researcher, I don't publish,
and that was a real conscious decision that by the end of it, I realized this sense of I don't
think I'm a very good academic because I don't like the research, and it doesn't really fuel me,

(17:01):
and I don't really wake up in the morning thinking about p values. And I suddenly thought,
I've enjoyed the teaching that I do in my PhD, and I've really enjoyed the engagement.
And at UCL, where I did my PhD, we worked at the Grant Museum quite a lot,
and we would engage with the students in there and get the skulls out and talk about convergent
and divergent evolution and all the different things you can see in different taxonomic groups,
and I loved that, and then I would go and do some teaching occasionally at my old university,

(17:24):
and I really enjoyed that. And then throughout the course of my PhD, I ended up on the telly and did
my first TV series completely out of the blue and thought I enjoy this. This is great. This is nice
because the level of engagement that was possible was suddenly global or national at the very least.
And this idea that I love science, clearly you love science. How do we spread that fascination,

(17:48):
that childlike joy, anticipation and sense of exploration to a bunch of people who haven't
signed up for a degree or a postdoc or any of these things, they're not paying to be there.
These are people who are normal people. My mum, my dad, my brother, your family,
people who don't traditionally sit within the academic sphere necessarily. How do I engage

(18:09):
them with science and give them a little bit of their insight into world I feel so privileged to
be part of, and the more I started doing that, I realized that's my area of science that I
really enjoy. And it's engaging my students or an audience or a bunch of kids. So yeah,
I think I've ended up staying in the UK more the last few years now.
I still go back to Africa sometimes, but I think my time of living in a mud hut with a cobra next

(18:31):
to my front door, and giant spiders living in the thatched roof of my mud hut and carrying
water for kilometres and kilometres every day, getting too old and grey for that Turi.
Yeah, but I mean this science engagement. I mean, you're one of the UK's top science communicators
now, and you've kind of built your career around this. I mean we see you on television with David
Attenborough, you present your own series, you clearly love it, and you're clearly really good at

(18:55):
it. You must have some really fun stories doing that. What's been one of your favourite ones?
First of all, working with David yes is incredible. It just is. I've been lucky
enough to work with him on two projects, and if you’d have said to me as a five-year-old,
would you like to can dig up mammoths? Of course I would. With the most famous TV
naturalist in the world. Of course you would. And now in my 40s, of course I still want to.

(19:17):
And I hope that excitement and that joy comes through from the work being done,
but also this sense of the scientist doing the work. And I think it's really important we have
so many different people representing science in the UK as communicators, and some are scientists,
and some aren’t, and David’s not a scientist, but I think it's really important within that
mix to have scientists there. I think we need to show that scientists A) are real

(19:38):
people and B) have fun and do amazing things.I know people at the moment who are exploring
the world looking for a critically endangered species, right through to
exploring how viruses affect different parts of different diseases. All these wonderful things,
exploring the modern world in a way that we couldn't have hoped or done a few years ago.
I used to a lot of stuff for the One Show, and I don't anymore, which is a sad thing,
but I remember one of the things I did once was, we worked with a buzzard that had been knocked

(20:04):
down sadly, and we took it to a team that I know really well up in the west near Hereford way,
where they had a bird of prey sanctuary, really lovely conservation based centre, and we teamed
up with one of the world's best bird vets, and he specializes in orthopaedic work, and he came
along and did tens of thousands of pounds worth of reconstructive surgery on this bog standard

(20:29):
buzzard that had been knocked down, because it allowed him to work on critically endangered
species around the world, things like vultures and other birds of prey, by practicing on this thing.
And actually to showcase that to 5 million people who watch the One Show every night, suddenly
you're getting conservation out there, you're getting veterinary work, you're getting global
conservation stories to an audience that if you said, do you want to watch a globally important

(20:52):
conservation story about a bird of prey that's having orthopaedic surgery, most people probably
wouldn't, no, actually. But do you want to see this guy operating on this bird that got knocked
down and then got released? Yeah, alright then.It's normalizing science. I think some of those
everyday occurrences have been my favourites. Those little nuggets that academics, colleagues
of ours do day in, day out, year in year out. To showcase that in a different way. Not in

(21:14):
a journal necessarily, or not in a traditional lecture, for example, nothing wrong with that.
But show it to a different audience to inspire a different audience. How many of those kids
might want to follow in our footsteps? How many of those adults will engage with that on some level?
because of the work that we do as collectively, yourself, myself, the academic community,
with their research. I think it's lovely.I'm going to bring you back to evolution because

(21:38):
of our lecture tonight. So, in your experience, what's people's perception of evolution? So,
mine seems to be the people think it only happens over really long periods,
but we know it's happening like around us now, sometimes very quickly. Covid was one where
we could literally kind of watch it evolving. Is this the same perception you have? What’s people's

(21:59):
perception of evolution? What do you get?I think the ones that really get me are
macroevolution. So Covid completely doesn't count because that's different evolution or
the reason I look like my dad, and my brother looks like his mum, and that's not evolution,
that's just macroevolution. And there are people who separate what evolution is and isn't based
on convenience. And yes, I can accept that eye colour and hair colour and so and so

(22:20):
is passed on, but that's not real evolution.So, we're already making definitions that don't
work and categories that don't work. This sense of it happens over hundreds of thousands of years,
and you can't possibly see it happening in a lab.Darwin's finches back in the
Galapagos, the most recent split is 1982. We've got a whole separate species from 1982, and we can
categorically look at that. But this sense that we need hundreds of thousands of years for anything

(22:42):
larger than a bacteria or virus isn't true either.The one that gets me, though, well the two that
get me… you’ve really started me... I do a whole lecture on this; my poor undergrads have just had
this. If any are listening to this, they’re probably going, oh God, not again, shut up.
What has she started?Yeah. Why has she started him off on this,
we could have told you don’t go down that route Turi. The two that really get me are,
this sense of it's directional. So, it's trying to improve, it's aiming

(23:07):
for something. And I keep saying to them, who's making it aim for something? What is the plan?
So, you either go down the route where you say, someone or something is planning this to an end
point. Let's go down that route and see where that ends up. Or you just say it's random mutations
that are selected for. But the giraffe that has sex with another giraffe because has a slightly
longer neck isn't going, oh my God, look at the size of his neck. It’s not that at all,

(23:28):
it’s not this, if I do that, and we end up having babies they’ll have such long necks, won’t they.
I'm all up for anthropomorphism, but I'm not up for this intelligent design within the
animal community themselves. They're not looking at each other and going,
if we do this in a thousand generations time, we'll be able to reach those leaves. Of course,
they're not. Evolution is not directional aiming. It's not linear, any of those things.

(23:49):
And we present to all the time with those awful little diagrams where you have a tadpole
that changes into a frog, that changes into some four-legged tetrapod that climbs out of a swamp,
then becomes a rat, that becomes a monkey, that becomes a caveman,
that becomes a human. The amount of people who think that's actually how it happens, that it
goes from A to B to C to D really nicely, like la la la la la. It does not happen like that in the
slightest. You can tell I'm getting annoyed now.And the other one, I guess, is it's all about

(24:14):
natural selection, survival of the fittest. That's all it is. Yeah, it’s all Darwin. I mean,
again I ask my undergrads, who's come here thinking it's all natural selection,
directional and takes millions of years and they're always a few hands that inevitably
rise. And that's how we teach at school and college. When they start learning about gene
flow and recombination and genetic drift and sexual selection, all these things,

(24:36):
it becomes much more nuanced and more complex, but more interesting. So yeah,
it's more complex than we ever give it credit for. It's not directional. It happens really rapidly in
some situations and really slow in others.I guess my other thing is there’s no such
thing as a living fossil. And the media loves that phrase. Living fossil been
discovered… it's not living fossil, it really isn’t. If you see an ammonite walking around,

(24:58):
that’s made of stone with legs, great, that's a living fossil. Anything else, isn't.
Horseshoe crabs are not living fossils, coelacanths have been evolving and changing for
hundreds of millions of years. Evolution doesn't stop, there is no such thing as a living fossil.
So, you've already been kind of answering this question,
but why do you think it's so important to teach and learn about evolution now then, do you think?

(25:19):
Fundamentally, I think from a very unique human perspective, it allows us to understand our place
in the world. And one of the things is this really accentuated the level of theory of mind. So,
we are potentially the only species out there able to really understand our place within the
cosmos. And to be able to do that, to be fully human and to fully appreciate where

(25:40):
you stand within your global community. We can understand that we probably came
from Neanderthals who probably came from, go back far enough, from things like Australopithecus and
then keep going back these wonderful things like Sahelanthropus, potentially 7 million years ago.
I can't imagine having that conversation with a chimp or a gorilla or an octopus, however
clever they are. So yeah, there's a whole bunch of reasons we should understand evolution and want to

(26:01):
explore it, but a lot of practical reasons there as well. Whether it's disease resistance, whether
it's prioritizing which species to try and save.Fundamentally, we're in a time when we're seeing
massive global change and climate change is real, first of all. Climate change is natural,
secondly, but also anthropogenic climate change is accentuating the natural cycle
that we're seeing. So, we are seeing rapid and disastrous loss of habitats, whole ecosystems,

(26:27):
groups of species, whole levels of species being lost here. And it just seems completely
incongruous to me that we don't prepare ourselves to try and save some of those
and actually understand why that's happening.And if you understand how evolution really worked,
I think for a lot of people, what we are now experiencing, going into, seeing around
us will be a lot more bloody scary right now.So much of your work is around science

(26:51):
communication, and I know you talk to sort of huge numbers of groups of people, but which is the one
do you think it's most important to be talking to?Probably going to lose myself some work here,
but I'm sick of talking to politicians. I'm sick of talking to policymakers. They know
what needs to be done, and it's almost the academic version of greenwashing. We

(27:11):
don't need to keep telling them, if you stop flying to these massive conferences, then we
can save polar bears. I'm just bored of that. We actually need to be focusing more on kids.
Yes, it's still important that some people talk to politicians and policymakers, of course, I'm
not being so naive to say we stop it completely, but the focus needs to be more on engaging and
empowering kids. In this sense, we always say this, but the actual quality of stuff going

(27:34):
out to kids has traditionally not been amazing.There are some amazing science communicators out
there now. You've got Steve Backshall, Maddie Moate, books by Jess French,
there are just so many good science communicators aiming at kids, and that's really important. And
even when I started writing kid's books, actually, kids nonfiction books, a lot of people said, oh,
I didn't know how you could dumb down science like that. That's not what we do. It's making it more

(27:56):
accessible. And I think making science more accessible for a generation who are more
empowered, they have a voice, they have a sense of community, and they have a sense of what they
want to achieve. And I think we should be focusing far more on engaging an audience,
a community, a demographic, a vast number of people who are becoming policymakers,
who are becoming the future. And I think we need to focus more on the kids.

(28:21):
Ben, thank you so much for talking with me. This was a podcast by the Milner Centre for
Evolution at the University of Bath. I'm Turi King and thank you for listening. If you have
any thoughts or comments on this or any other episodes, please contact us via our social media.
For more information about the Milner Centre for Evolution, you can visit our website.