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Professor David Farrier (University of Edinburgh) discusses his 2025 book Nature’s Genius: Evolution’s Lessons for a Changing Planet and explores how rapid, human-driven evolutionary pressures reveal both the fragility and inventive resilience of life. We cover urban evolution (birds and snails), domestication and self-domestication, collective and distributed forms of intelligence across living systems, and how rethinking time can help us reconnect with the natural world. The conversation balances urgency with hope: we can change behaviour and systems - not by waiting for nature to “fix” things, but by learning from nature’s adaptive strategies.

Key takeaways:

• Human activities are now major selection pressures shaping evolution — sometimes rapidly.
• Plasticity (the ability of organisms to change gene expression and behaviour) offers insights for human adaptation — e.g., city design, economies, conservation strategies.
• Intelligence in nature is often collective and co-evolved; viewing ecosystems as forms of distributed intelligence could reshape politics and policy.
• Time matters: reframing our relationship with temporal scales (wild clocks vs. clock time) supports long-term thinking and reconnection.
• Nature recovery begins with “nature reconnection” — shifting how we see ourselves (embedded, not separate).

Guest bio (brief):
David Farrier is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. His first book, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, examined the marks we are leaving on the planet and how they might appear in the deep-future fossil record; it was named a book of the year by both The Times and The Telegraph and has been translated into multiple languages. His new book Nature’s Genius (2025) examines how life adapts under human-caused change and what lessons that offers for our own future and has been shortlisted for major awards.
Buy the book / further reading:
Nature’s Genius: Evolution’s Lessons for a Changing Planet — Canongate Books. Available as hardback, e-book and audio; shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing (and other 2025 recognitions). More details / purchase: https://canongate.co.uk/books/4911-natures-genius-evolution-039-s-lessons-for-a-changing-planet/

The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners.

The views, opinions and positions expressed within this podcast are those of the speakers alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, or its researchers.
The work of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is made possible thanks to the support of the Leverhulme Trust.