IT MAY have been hard to whittle 109 entries down to a shortlist of six, but
the judges for this year鈥檚 Rh么ne-Poulenc Science Book Prize have an even
harder job picking a winner. These are six seriously good books.
Most traditional is Lawrence Wright鈥檚 Twins, a carefully composed
despatch from the nature-nurture wars. Nicely written but otherwise
unremarkable, Wright鈥檚 book summarises recent data and finds a clear swing to
nature. This is the message of dozens of Sunday supplement features, so the
conclusion that the genes have it is unsurprising.
Genes are a surprising omission from Ernst Mayr鈥檚 This is Biology,
in which the nonagenarian doyen of evolutionary theory expounds his vision of
the life sciences. This is the odd one out here, learned and wise, something
every biology student should read, but not really a popular book. And as Mayr
admits, it also excludes molecular biology and neurobiology, so the title is a
tad misleading.
Advertisement
No such problem with Fermat鈥檚 Last Theorem, Fourth Estate鈥檚 latest
pop-science bestseller. Simon Singh made an award-winning BBC film about how
Fermat鈥檚 350-year-old challenge was overcome. His book tells the same story, and
a great story it is. Ten-year-old Cambridge schoolboy falls in love with a great
unsolved problem, and amazes the world鈥檚 mathematicians by finally cracking it
30 years later. Singh copes valiantly with the fact that Fermat鈥檚 theorem is
highly understandable and Andrew Wiles鈥檚 proof is not. But his penchant for
historical anecdote makes the book rather long for what is, in the end, a simple
tale of obstacles overcome by heroic individual effort.
Richard Fortey鈥檚 Life: An Unauthorised Biography is also lengthy,
but with the excuse that he is romping through 4 billion years of evolutionary
history. It is a classic formula: a scientist who can write well enough to
convey his love of his subject. With a topic as compelling as the slow
embroidery of life鈥檚 great tapestry one could hardly go wrong. Forty鈥檚 version
of the history painstakingly reconstructed from scattered remains鈥攈e calls
it 鈥渁n approximate story peddled by optimists鈥濃�攎akes you want to grab a
hammer and join the fossil hunt.
Fortey stops when human history begins. For what followed and why, turn to
Guns, Germs and Steel. Why did some peoples become haves, others have
nots? Jared Diamond鈥檚 answer begins in New Guinea, where hunter-gatherers have
only recently been absorbed into the ever-broadening stream of modernity. But it
ranges far beyond, justifying his subtitle鈥檚 claim to offer a short history of
everybody for the past 13 000 years. For Diamond, the details of human history
unfold from basic facts of biogeography: from regional differences in climate,
landscape and, especially, which crops grew where.
Diamond is intellectually daring, but for sheer chutzpah he is outdone by
David Deutsch. The Fabric of Reality is a wonderfully immodest attempt
to bring together quantum physics, computation theory, Darwinian evolution and
Karl Popper鈥檚 philosophy of science in a coherent world picture which Deutsch
claims combines our best efforts to explain the nature of things. It is probably
the most wide-ranging contender since The Emperor鈥檚 New Mind, which won
the prize for Roger Penrose back in 1990. The contentious bits are his
allegiance to Popper and to a 鈥渕ultiverse鈥� interpretation of quantum
mechanics鈥攏ot just one but infinitely many parallel universes. But the
whole thing is wonderfully lucid, bearing comparison with great pre-war
popularisers such as James Jeans.
Who will win? Diamond, Deutsch and Fortey strike me as a cut above the rest.
Guns, Germs and Steel justly won a Pulitzer in the US, but it is
basically an expanded version of one chapter in Diamond鈥檚 earlier The Third
Chimpanzee, which has already won him the Rh么ne-Poulenc prize. So it
looks like Deutsch for dazzle, or Fortey for a more familiar story formidably
well told. Place your bets and collect on 9 June.