SCIENCE on tape is a fraught enterprise. Unlike novels, popular science books
tend to go in for extended explanations鈥攎iss a bit and you are lost. A
book translated straight to audio is all experienced at the same pace, and there
can be no hand-waving and no diagrams to help the listener follow. It needs an
engaging voice, one that will hold the attention over four hours or so. And,
inevitably, the listener will have to contend with the stray sounds encountered
while jogging, working out in the gym or (more likely in my case) just sitting
on the train.
As a good series editor of Orion鈥檚 talking science titles, Richard Dawkins
ought to be setting the other contributors a good example. But the success of
his recording does show up some of the others. What this means is that the text
needs to be extraordinarily clear to come across in this medium: it cannot rely
on the skill of the reader. That is why Dawkins, Mr Lucidity in print, is so
good to listen to. In River Out of Eden (拢9.99, all titles, ISBN
0752839853), his passion for persuading you about evolution leads him to explain
himself so carefully that, just listening to him, you feel much cleverer than
usual.
Graham Cairns-Smith, reading his own text of Seven Clues to the Origin of
Life (ISBN 0752839845), shares that enviable lucidity, as befits one who
takes Sherlock Holmes as his model of scientific thinking. His idea that, in a
world before DNA, information could have been encoded in the crystal structure
of clay is one of the most intriguing speculations about how life began.
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The other pair of this biology quartet are a different proposition. Mark
Ridley鈥檚 A Darwin Selection (ISBN 075283987X) is an agreeable way of
catching up with all those bits of the bearded one鈥檚 books you always meant to
read. Derek Jacobi鈥檚 delivery will be a little actorly for some, but his
rendition of the sights of the Beagle voyage, the logic of natural selection,
and the fascination that worms seem to have, fit their Victorian cadence.
I suspect Edward Wilson鈥檚 courtly Southern tones would have suited his own
Biodiversity rather well. Instead we have a rather flat rendition by
Stefan Buczacki, which raises the other problem of audio science. Buczacki, a
regular contributor to the BBC鈥檚 radio programme Gardener鈥檚 Question
Time, is not a natural for the long-haul read. If the voice moves evenly on
and on, you sink deeper into your chair, sleep overtakes you . . . Wilson has a
deeply informed concern for the fate of the world鈥檚 species. But as Buczacki
embarks on yet another list of them, you may feel there are just too damn
many.