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HISTORY and biography, ocean science and psychiatry, quarks, genes and
cyberlife: here’s hoping no one told the judges for the Aventis science book
prize that the job involved comparing like with like.

One name on this year’s notably strong shortlist sounds
familiar, but it is Mark Ridley, not the unrelated Matt. He makes it onto the
list with a closely woven tale of genes, evolution and the avoidance of error.
Mendel’s Demon is a thorough investigation of how a process as prone to
mistakes as DNA replication can be the basis for complex life. Ridley’s
explanation of how living things avoid mutational meltdown is always clear,
though his style sometimes becomes a bit lecture-like. He matches Matt Ridley
for intellectual rigour, if not for keeping the reader entertained.

There’s plenty of entertainment in Paul Strathern’s Mendeleyev’s
Dream, the story of one of the great summary statements of how the world
is—the periodic table of the elements. His tale is marred only by a rather
simple-minded attitude to history. Strathern seems to believe that only earlier
thinkers who thought like us were sensible. This is a shame because it was
alchemists, not chemists, who made many of the early elemental discoveries.
Strathern’s penchant for awarding these proto-chemists brownie points for
uncovering what now count as facts—in spite of their deeply misguided
world views—may irritate enough of the judges to bar him from the
prize.

Lewis Wolpert’s Malignant Sadness is more of a primer, looking at
depression for people prone to the illness, or their carers. It contains lots of
reliable and clearly presented information, but doesn’t convey the shock of the
new, which is what gives so much pop-science its broad appeal. A worthy
inclusion on the shortlist, but maybe too worthy to be an outright winner.

Robert Kunzig’s Mapping the Deep is a more conventional pop-science
offering, but brilliant nonetheless. His portrait of ocean science, and the
people who transformed our knowledge of the watery two-thirds of the globe in
recent decades, is a real contender. The book’s ocean panorama takes in more new
worlds than a whole series of Star Trek, from the microscopic lives of
sulphur-eating bacteria in volcanic vents to the global climate system. A real
eye-opener.

So too, in its way, is Steve Grand’s Creation. Grand, the ace
programmer who invented the computer game Creatures, explains the
thinking behind the critters who now live in millions of computers around the
world. But his book does more than that. It is his own highly individual view of
the prospects for virtual beings and artificial intelligence in a digital
world.

Finally, a different kind of thinking: the great physicist Murray Gell-Mann’s
struggle to understand the basic stuff of the Universe. George Johnson’s
treatment of the awesomely talented but exasperating Gell-Mann is conventional
biography, but what a biography. He manages a rich portrayal of a complex
subject as well as recreating the sheer confusion in particle physics from the
late 1940s to the early 1960s. This makes the creation of order among the
particles by conjuring up quarks seem almost as fitting as it must have done to
Gell-Mann. One of the great triumphs of 20th-century science is brought alive
for the 21st. In Strange Beauty Johnson has produced the most
satisfying book of the lot.