In this witty, fact-packed A-Z, Newman takes the listener on a whirlwind tour from caring, sharing vampire bats to intelligent slime mould; from pacifist baboons to Richard Dawkins wrestling naked with his postman; from the invisibility cloak of the Hawaiian bobtail squid to Francis “DNA” Crick’s belief that life on Earth began with alien spaceships.

The only comedian ever credited in a paper published in the science journal Nature, Newman explores how stunning scientific breakthroughs have turned received ideas of evolution upside down.

Now a BBC Radio 4 comedy series, The Entirely Accurate Encyclopaedia of Evolution is based on the stand-up show Robert Newman’s New Theory of Evolution.