A Tale of Two Species: How Humans and Plants Co-evolved

Talks on Tuesdays is a live event series bringing big ideas, real experts, and curious minds together - at your favourite local venues. Think thought-provoking lectures, audience questions, and post-talk mingling over drinks and dinner.

This isn’t a uni lecture. It’s a social, intelligent night out.Come alone or with friends, leave with something to talk about.

Event Schedule:

6.30pm Arrival & Doors Open

7pm Lecture Starts

7.45pm Q&A

8pm Talk Concludes

8.30pm Event Closes.

*Please arrive close to 6.30pm

A La Carte menu and full bar available throughout the night - pay as you go.

Your Topic:
A Tale of Two Species: How Humans and Plants Co-evolved:

The twentieth century was an extraordinary global experiment in displacing fresh whole plant foods with increasingly refined, fractionated and ultra-processed products. At the same time, chronic inflammatory and metabolic diseases have become major causes of ill health around the world. Whatever else we have learned from this transformation, eating fewer vegetables and less diverse plant food has not served human health particularly well.

For tens of millions of years, plant foods were active participants in the evolutionary worlds of our ancestors. In tasting, digesting, avoiding, seeking out and adapting to an extraordinary landscape of plant chemistry, our ancestors were doing more than consuming calories. We were changing plants. Plants were changing us. In this talk, we will look at that relationship between humans and plant foods through the emerging science of bioactives: the thousands of compounds plants produce for defence, signalling, pigmentation, reproduction and survival that can also interact with human physiology.

We will explore why humans can taste bitterness, why we lost the ability to make our own vitamin C, how colour vision may have helped primates find ripe fruit, how gut microbes transform plant compounds, and how cooking and fermentation allowed humans to manipulate plant chemistry outside the body. These biological relationships were later joined by culture, cultivation and domestication, creating an evolutionary feedback loop between bodies, behaviours and landscapes.

Your Speaker:

Dr Paul H. Mason is a cultural anthropologist, researcher and science communicator whose work spans food, health, medicine and human behaviour. He is part of a large Australian research program investigating the bioactive compounds found naturally in fresh fruit and vegetables and what their science can tell us about the long relationship between plants and human health. His research has taken him from tuberculosis clinics in Vietnam and Papua New Guinea to questions about nutrition, human evolution, behaviour change and the public understanding of science. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and produces the interview series Bioactive Bites.