Jon Turney Rounds Up This Year’s Pop-science Books Essay, Research Paper

Natural selectionWhich of Richard Dawkins’s books is still one of Amazon’s hot 30 in nature and science? Not his most recent offering, Unweaving the Rainbow. Could it be Climbing Mount Improbable, from the early 1990s, or even The Blind Watchmaker, from 1986? No, it is The Selfish Gene, first published more than 25 years ago. If you guessed right, you have a clue to why the popular-science market is getting harder for publishers. Assume, simple-mindedly perhaps, that we read science writers because they can tell us stuff. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there was an awful lot of stuff they had not told us about – fruits of the extraordinary growth in research which followed the second world war. Cosmology, particle physics, evolutionary theory, molecular biology, neurology – all were bursting with new findings and ideas. There was also a generation of readers who felt that they were missing out on an important part of the culture. Now, for the most part, popularisation seems to have caught up. One consequence is that the people who have made a habit of this kind of thing have ended up competing with themselves. First novels are usually little more than signs of promise, but a reader new to Dawkins might as well start with The Selfish Gene, because a science writer’s first book often stands with their best work. Though later efforts may have fewer rough edges, benefit from deeper thought about explanation, or be less dense, they are less likely to offer actual new stuff. So publishers are pitching titles into a more mature market; maybe, too, at a mature readership. In the 1980s and 1990s, we seemed eager to believe the claims made by titles. The fashion for brilliant scientists to tackle big questions made new stars of authors who claimed to know the secrets of the universe or to fathom the mysteries of the brain. But their answers often turned out to be rather small. If you read them critically, you found that Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained did not explain consciousness, Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works gave only a few good hints about its workings, and (though this was deliberate) Martin Rees’s Before the Beginning told everything about the universe except what happened before it began. Theories of everything always come with a catch. Not only do we no longer credit that Stephen Hawking can show us the mind of god, as he hinted at the close of A Brief History of Time, we now know that he does not believe it either. A mature market, then, but not yet a saturated one. New readers are still drawn in by the high production values of TV tie-ins. The measured text of John Gribbin’s Space (BBC) is a relief after the relentless gee-whiz of Sam Neill’s TV series, while The Blue Planet (BBC) looks as gorgeous as a book as it did on screen. There are worthwhile new books taking issue with oversold theories, such as John Dupré’s excellent critique of evolutionary psychology and economic rationality, Human Nature and the Limits of Science (Clarendon). There were few new books in 2001 from science’s big names, except for Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam) and How to Build a Time Machine (Allen Lane) from the physicist Paul Davies. The prolific mathematician Ian Stewart was as breezily entertaining as ever in Flatterland (Macmillan), although this extension of a single idea – imagining a two-dimensional world as an aid to understanding higher dimensions – tried some readers’ patience. By the end of the book, the dimensions are nearing double figures. The historical turn in popular science, prompted by Dava Sobel’s snappy little Longitude, goes on. This makes good publishing sense – if there is less new stuff, then revisit the old – although the narrative demands of readable history are now drawing in authors outside the normal confines of popular science, as in Simon Winchester’s stylish The Map that Changed the World (Viking) or Simon Garfield’s recently paperbacked Mauve (Faber), about the chemist William Perkin. However, science writers can also find new angles in history, as Philip Ball shows in Bright Earth (Viking), an exploration of how the availability of reliable, non-lethal pigments marks the history of art. There is still scope, too, for clever young scientists to offer views of new fields, or new views of old ones. Peter Bentley’s Digital Biology (Headline) gives a wide-ranging tour of the intersection of computer science and evolutionary theory. Janna Levin’s How the Universe Got Its Spots, due early next year from Weidenfeld, promises a fresh look at cosmology from the point of view of topology – what shape is space? There are still few books that give a good picture of what it is like to do science, especially the many varieties of contemporary science. Perhaps we are more curious about how scientists think than what they do in the lab; or perhaps it is just hard to make it interesting – James Watson’s confusing and distinctly uncompelling sequel to his classic The Double Helix, Genes, Girls and Gamow (Oxford), was certainly enough to make any publisher wary of big-name autobiography. Biography also requires a longer-term commitment from the author than most pop-science. Imagine how long it would take to research a decent life of, say, Francis Crick, who probably did more for science than anyone else in the second half of the 20th century. (Someone will no doubt soon be up for it, as the Wellcome Foundation has just paid £1m for Crick’s papers.) There are also surprisingly few good books on some of the scientific issues which grab the headlines, although Robin Baker’s ambitious Fragile Science (Macmillan) may be a sign of things to come. Baker offers a judicious examination of a whole range of problems, from whether sunscreens help prevent cancer to global warming, while trying to build up a realistic picture of the limits of scientific certainty. It certainly makes a change from cloning, which has prompted enough titles to evoke visions of mad scientists growing books in a vat in some secret laboratory and bypassing authors entirely. Reports of the state of human genetics – that other controversial bit of biology – age pretty rapidly, so new titles keep coming. Medicine and disease (and nowadays biological weapons) remain close to our hopes and fears, guaranteeing a steady flow of new titles. The same is true for the science of the environment – though, apart from James Lovelock (whose Homage to Gaia came out in paperback this autumn), the environment still seems to lack a star author. In general, readers should probably expect well-crafted books that take pains to be accurate and up-to-date, rather than amazing revelations about ultimate questions. And what of Richard Dawkins? His next book, due in a year or two, will doubtless be beautifully written. It will be about evolution. There should just be time to read all his other books about evolution before it comes out. · Jon Turney teaches science communication at University College London.