Prizewinning science books have to be more than good books: they have to be good science as well. This makes the £10,000 Aventis prize - to be announced on Monday - a tough choice made much tougher by the fact that science moves on. What one year seems like a brilliant statement of a paradigm shift in scientific thinking could quite easily seem wilfully wrongheaded the next. Conversely, a text that verges on the batty could be orthodoxy two years later.
The late Stephen Jay Gould was shortlisted in 1991 with Wonderful Life, a brilliant discursive study of the implications of a set of strange discoveries in the Burgess shale in the Canadian Rockies: the fossils were bizarre, the theme profound and the framework for the thesis wittily chosen. I was one of the judges: it seemed to me at the time that to have given the award to anyone else would have been an aesthetic misjudgment, like preferring Dick Francis to Dickens. The text remains brilliant: the scientific argument, however, has come under fire not just from biologists of the same literary status as Gould, but also from the biologist who made the discoveries on which the book was based. That's hindsight for you: a wonderful asset in a court of appeal, but in book prizes, there is no such thing.
With hindsight, prize panels often seem to have missed the obvious. Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time was not a prizewinning book. That is, it may have sold 6m copies in hardback, and precipitated a publishing phenomenon still known as the Hawking effect, but it never won the science book prize. In a year in which Professor Hawking appeared on the cover of Time, and set in motion a caravan of enduring celebrity that even got him onto the Simpsons, the prize could nevertheless have justifiably gone to another bestseller, Chaos, by James Gleick. Instead, the 1989 award went to a perfectly readable but sadly little-read text about palaeoanthropology called Bones of Contention, by Roger Lewin.
What was once called the Royal Society-Copus and then the Rhone-Poulenc prize was launched in 1988 in the pious hope that a science book prize could attract the publicity to match what was then the Booker. In fact, the winner of the 1988 prize was a book produced by the British Medical Association called Living With Risk. The choice reflects the dilemma of the judges: do they choose something improving or absorbing? How often are you likely to get both?
Quite often, it turns out. In 1994, judges had to wrestle with an extraordinary set of choices. They settled for The Language of the Genes by Steve Jones, a choice that looked good but is unlikely to be stay in print because the science of genetics has moved on with astonishing speed. In 1995, they had an eclectic collection of candidates including works by Arthur C Clarke and Edward O Wilson and Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct: the prize went instead to a reference book called The Consumer's Good Chemical Guide, by John Emsley.
The prize has twice gone to the US biologist Jared Diamond, deservedly for his history Guns, Germs and Steel, and for his epic of humanity The Rise And Fall of the Third Chimpanzee. It has, however, never gone to Richard Fortey, whose Life: An Unauthorised Biography deserves to stay in print for decades, nor to Richard Dawkins, shortlisted at least twice, nor to Matt Ridley, on the shortlist for the fourth time. It did not go to Dava Sobel, who wrote the 1996 surprise success Longitude, and who started a trend for compact books with one-word titles (Cod, for instance, and Salt).
Both last year's shortlist and this year's seem like very tough calls. This may be a reflection on the high standard of storytelling skills and scientific expertise now expected of Aventis prize candidates. Or it may be a reflection, of the winnowing process that sifts books as the years tick by, making some seem of lasting worth, others oddly dated. This should be no surprise: each year's crop of books represents a kind of story-so-far in the great adventure of science. They can and should be read with enthusiasm and remembered with profit, most of all by those people who are looking forward to the next episode.
The shortlist
In the Beginning was the Worm: Finding the secrets of life in a tiny hemaphrodite, by Andrew Brown
Odds: 9/2
Four out of every five creatures on the planet are nematode worms. They come in all shapes and sizes but Caernorhabditis elegans is about 1mm long, and goes from egg to worm in four days. It has only 959 cells (humans have 100 trillion) but C. elegans can sniff out food, and move towards it. It comes in two sexes, male and hermaphrodite. It has a mouth at one end, an anus at the other and a tube connecting the two. So, think of it as a simplified human. C. elegans was one of the rehearsals for the great human genome project, and the sequencers cut their teeth and honed their hardware on its microscopic tissue and copious DNA. It has become one of the marvels of biological science. In 1986, everything known about it could have been fitted into a textbook. At one conference in 2002, more than 1,000 new papers were delivered on it. "When we understand the worm, we'll understand life," said John Sulston, Nobel prizewinner and worm-sequencer.
· In the Beginning was the Worm by Andrew Brown is published by Simon & Schuster (ISBN 0743207165) at £15.99 hardback. To buy at the offer price of £13.99 plus p&p call Guardian Book Service on 0870 836 0875
A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
Odds: 7/2
Having merrily explored Britain, his native America, Europe and Australia, humourist travel writer Bryson turns his innocent eye on the solar system, the universe and life itself, plus quarks, relativity, the fossil record, DNA, the genome, microbes, human origins, the whole bag of tricks. He has read the right books, he has talked to the right people, and he has thought it all into a sensible order. It's not just a brave effort: it is a pretty successful effort. At best, it is as if someone had crossed the polymathic Isaac Asimov with the wide-eyed Mark Twain. Impressively, Bryson ticked most of the items on my personal list of things people should know. Less impressively, a serious reader could be rendered breathless by Bryson's grip of the "gasp factor". As in: "Imagine a million really weighty cannonballs squeezed down to the size of a marble and - well, you're still not even close."
· A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is published by Doubleday (ISBN 0385408188) at £20 hardback. To buy at the offer price of £17 plus p&p call Guardian Book Service on 0870 836 0875
Magic Universe: The Oxford guide to modern science, by Nigel Calder
Odds: 6/1
Here's evidence of a steady hand, a cool nerve and a clear sense of what matters: 700 pages covering cloning, chaos theory, the carbon cycle and the Cambrian explosion; embryos, evolution, El Niño and extraterrestrial life; immortality, the immune system and cosmic impacts; speech, starbursts and stem cells; primate behaviour and proteomes ... Nigel Calder is a science writer with a superb record and immense experience. His survey of the huge, sprawling endeavour of modern science is nothing at all like Bill Bryson's "let me take you by the hand" journey. This is the real stuff. The Gaia hypothesis? The co-evolution of grasslands and grazers? The scientific challenge of grammar, and gravity wave astronomy? The riddle of left- and right-handedness in nature? The chemistry of memory? They are all here, and much more besides: there are 28 pages of notes. Dip and dart. Don't even think of a serial read (but yes, cereals are in there too).
· Magic Universe by Nigel Calder is published by OUP (ISBN 0198507925) at £25 hardback. To buy at the offer price of £22 plus p&p call Guardian Book Service on 0870 836 0875
Mutants: On the form, varieties and errors of the human body, by Armand Marie Leroi
Odds: 3/1
The cover says "As seen on Channel 4", but this is like no other television book. Humane, literate, elegant, thoughtful and disgusting, this book has something for everyone. Geneticists identify genes most easily when they go wrong. There is much to learn from a mutant, a monstrosity "wherein notwithstanding, there is a kind of Beauty," as Sir Thomas Browne wrote almost 400 years ago. Leroi traces the Cyclops from Homer to Leonardo da Vinci, who apparently drew conjoined twins with their forebrains fused. Cyclopia is a brain deformity in humans: afflicting one in 16,000 live births and one in 200 miscarriages. But think of the pig born in Iowa. It had two snouts, two tongues and three eyes, each with an optic stalk (scientists callously called it Ditto). Such monstrous marvels help geneticists learn a lot about the lottery of inheritance and development, and there are lessons everywhere: in great art, in fairground exhibits and even in Auschwitz.
· Mutants by Armand Marie Leroi is published by HarperCollins (ISBN 0002571137) at £20 hardback. To buy at the offer price of £17 plus p&p call Guardian Book Service on 0870 836 0875
Nature via Nurture: Genes, experience and what makes us human, by Matt Ridley
Odds: 4/1
Note the title: via, not versus. We are as we are not because of the genes we have or the upbringing by our parents but because nature and nurture interplay: genes influence human behaviour, and human behaviour influences genes. This book journeys over old battlegrounds and explores new ones: it takes in eugenics, evolutionary science, neuroscience, the lessons of Pavlov and Freud and the evidence from serious epidemiological research. The whole is studded with Ridley's own bright ideas. His "Asterix theory of personality" neatly formulates an observation you could confirm in any office: that people choose the niches that suit them best. This book is written with a newspaperman's sense of pace, and a biologist's sense of seriousness. There are 24 pages of notes. Some bits are tough going, but whoever said that it would be easy to explain humankind, especially to other querulous humans?
· Nature via Nurture by Matt Ridley is published by 4th Estate (ISBN 1841157457) at £18.99 hardback. To buy at the offer price of £16.99 plus p&p call Guardian Book Service on 0870 836 0875
Backroom Boys: The secret return of the British boffin, by Francis Spufford
Odds: 4/1
A few of us remember Space Age Britain: the nation that built Blue Streak and launched Black Arrow. Just one successful launch of one satellite aboard one British rocket and then it was back to pusillanimity, in a series of government decisions that looked stupid and cowardly at the time, and even worse now. Then it was on to Concorde, the technological wonder that nobody really wanted, and before you knew where you were, people were playing computer games on their Acorns and BBC Micros. I'm not quite sure about the subtitle - did the boffins really go? is the comeback a secret? - but Francis Spufford has written a very good book indeed on what you might call engineers with attitude: people who do amazing things with both discipline and delight. John Sulston, the giant of C. elegans, puts in an appearance in a brilliantly told version of the drama of the race for the human genome and the book ends with a poignant paean for Beagle 2: in a perfect world, the probe that would have put Britain back on the high frontier.
· Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford is published by Faber &Faber (ISBN 0571214967)at £14.99 hardback.To buy at the offer price of £12.99 plus p&p call Guardian Book Service on 0870 836 0875
