The Best Popular Science Books of 2022: The Royal Society Book Prize

Thanks for joining us to discuss the shortlist for the 2022 Royal Society Science Prize, an award that highlights the best new popular science books. What are you, as judges, looking for?

I think what we want is for it to be very accessible and easy to read, but scientifically correct. All of the shortlisted books are fully referenced, with source material. Opinion can be interesting, but we want informed opinion, and we want that opinion to be referenced. The writers on the shortlist are not all practising scientists themselves, but they are certainly all people who know the field very well and have read the original literature. The Royal Society symbolises the best science in the UK, so it’s important that the books have a solid scientific basis.

How many popular science books did you consider for the 2022 prize?

More than 200 books arrived at my house. Imagine that. My husband was initially aghast but agreed that it was exciting. We needed to bring that down to a longlist of 50 books to give to the judging panel; I thought long and hard about how to do this in a fair way. I work as a professor at UCL, and I have some very informed and literate early career colleagues, so I invited some of them over for a very serious evening—scientists, mainly, but also an economist and some business people. We worked through the books systematically, ruling out those that did not seem right for the prize—biographies, for example, or books that were a bit off the wall, or books about pets…. That sort of thing. You know, the story of someone’s life is extremely interesting to me, but might not be entirely appropriate for this kind of prize. We got down to the final 50 with great consensus.

Then our panel of judges read the longlist. We had Rory Cellan-Jones, a broadcaster with a strong knowledge of science and technology; the novelist Mike Gayle; the nature presenter Kate Humble; and an experimental particle physicist, Dr Josh Mcfadyen. We all sent in blind scores. When I went to chair the first meeting, I expected it to be quite difficult. I chair a lot of award panels, but within the sciences. My mother was the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, and she had told me about being on committees for literary prizes when it had been a question of finding a winner that not everyone hated, as opposed to finding one that everyone liked. She was quite funny about it, but she did say it was sometimes a little acrimonious.

But actually, it was a great meeting—the overlap of our scores was very high. It was a fantastic group of engaged and interesting people with different world views. I hope it will be as straightforward to choose the actual winner in November. I do have a favourite, but I’m not going to say what it is. I would be really happy for any of them to win.

Let’s walk through the shortlist of six popular science books you’ve chosen for 2022. First up we have The Greywacke: How a Priest, a Soldier and a School Teacher Uncovered 300 Million Years of History by Nick Davidson.

The Greywacke is, if you like, a classic history of science book. And it’s really, really fun. Nick Davidson paints a picture of these three Victorian geologists, at a time when many scientists were gentlemen; wealthy men who didn’t need to earn a living. Many, I’m sure, were very bright and enquiring, and wanted to do something other than just… go hunting, or whatever it was rich men did. It was a sort of fashion in the 19th century to try to understand mountains and fossils.

The book paints a picture of one of the men, an academic in Cambridge, who got the job because he knew more about the Church than he did about geology—the book is full of passing observations that make you laugh. So he got the Chair in geology and carried on with his fieldwork studying a peculiarity in the formation of mountains in Wales. He was then approached by a member of the gentry,  an ex-soldier from a wealthy background who was energetic and good at raising money, and they become unlikely friends and coinvestigators. This friendship is beautifully illustrated—as a scientist, it could happen today, this balance between the rather cerebral, careful, lovely person who has a lot of teaching commitments but maybe is not so skilled at raising money and getting things done, and another who is quite dynamic and powerful, a good talker and good at raising money, but perhaps isn’t quite so bright as the other one.

This reminds me a little of how people talk about the friendship between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the social psychologists—both brilliant, in different, complementary ways. Although I think their relationship was rather fraught.

In this case, in the book, the momentous discovery that they made led to a horrible split. It’s extraordinary, the arguments they have, and I don’t want to spoil it. But along the way, it’s a fantastic illustration of the way they lived, and their obsession with geology and the rocks and fossils of Wales. You learn an amazing amount about how it is that people ever discovered tectonic shifts, and other basic elements of geology. I mean, I have no geology background at all, but I learned so much from reading this book, which reads like a historical novel, and really enjoyed it. I haven’t met Nick Davidson, I don’t think he’s a professional geologist, but he clearly understands it and explains it all so well.

Next on the list is Different: What Apes Can Teach Us About Gender by Frans de Waal.

This is a really impressive book, especially in the light of current gender debates, and brings a new and very well-written scientific perspective to the debate, based on the behaviour of primates.

Frans de Waal is a primatologist who has worked amongst primates all his life, and knows a huge amount about their behaviour. He takes us through all the behaviours which we humans tend to obsess over in children—are boys being forced to hold guns? Are girls being forced into pretty pink dresses?—and also the whole business about finding a mate, how young females and young males behave, sex for enjoyment, sex for reproduction. All of these things are happening in this ape community.

It’s incredibly interesting. The argument running through it is that it’s almost arrogant of human beings to think that they have their own special social construct. It is well understood that gender is not entirely about sex and he acknowledges the negative effects of the huge gender-related pressures and expectations that shape our lives. I was brought up in an environment where women were dismissed and everything they said was considered trivial, so I am very aware of these pressures. But de Waal explains that the behaviour associated with gender is essentially a primate phenomenon, not a human one.

He describes many wonderful scenarios. Out of nowhere, a female chimp will emerge that acts in every way like a male. They are biologically female, but they join the males and the males will see them as one of their own. They’re not interested in her as a sexual partner, she will, in every way, live like a male. And, similarly, the other way round. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen, and it is entirely accepted by the chimp community.

Another very interesting thing is that female chimps, right from the moment they can walk, will pick up little sticks and pretend they are babies. This is scientific observation of animal behaviour at its best, because it relates so closely to us.

De Waal makes the conclusion, which is quite brave in the current climate, that although, yes, there are individuals who live differently from the rest, that does not mean that gender is a social construct. It could be an individual choice based on a biological process. He makes that argument very reasonably and gently and I’d recommend this book to anybody interested in the gender issue. He just describes primate behaviour how it is—reminding us that primates are what we are.

Next on our shortlist of 2022 popular science books is Spike: The Virus vs. The People—the Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar with Anjana Ahuja.

You may know Jeremy Farrar as the Director of the Wellcome Trust, the biomedical charity. He was also on the Sage committee.

For those outside the UK, that was the British government’s Covid-19 scientific advisory group.

Internationally, he is one of the top experts in epidemics. Most of his training has been working overseas in malaria and other tropical diseases, so he has lots of contacts all over the world, and was right at the heart of the epidemic.

The book is written so well, like an adventure story. It begins with Farrar sitting in an airport on Christmas Eve in 2019, waiting to come home to see his family, when he receives a phone call—a covert phone call from a colleague in China, who is aware of what’s happening and wants to tell him. That’s how it begins. And it explains how, in the beginning, there was so much resistance—not just from China, but from the US, because very powerful people did not want to believe this epidemic was real. I think at various points, he genuinely feared for his life, because only a very few people in the world knew that something truly dreadful was happening.

It develops from there: the frustration of being on the Sage committee, the hornets’ nest of not trusting our own government. Anybody who might feel that they have had enough of reading about Covid should still read this book because it is the inside story, and it reads like a thriller. Farrar really knows what he’s talking about, and it’s no holds barred. I think he feels, having lived through this, he’s going to tell the world what the decision-making was like. And the sad thing is that he concludes that it honestly didn’t need to happen. That’s really sad. He also feels that we’re not preparing for it to happen again.

But it’s not a gloomy book. As I said, it’s very dynamic and a great story. It explains the rapid development of vaccinations, but it’s not hugely technical—it’s told much more as part of the adventure, rather than going into lots of detail about how they were made.

Let’s move on to A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters by Henry Gee. What a great title!

A fantastic title. Do you know, I see this book almost as one long poem. The style might not be to everyone’s taste, but I think everybody would agree that it’s amazing. The use of language is breathtaking. You feel like you’re part of this extraordinary evolutionary process, both physical and biological. He stops it from just being drearily descriptive, and takes you on this wave of fantastic imagery—describing what was happening so that you can see it.  Even if it’s some sort of ancient organism producing carbon dioxide or other biochemical process, it’s all done with such dynamism! You almost feel tired at the end. It’s very, very good.

The last chapter is ‘The Past of The Future’, and it’s as if he’s writing from the perspective of the end of the universe and you do get the feeling that it’s inevitable, but not in a gloomy way. We all care about global warming… but this is just the beginning. He tells us not to despair, and that life is still going on, but you do get the sense that—goodness me—this is such a tiny, tiny period amid the massive timescale of the universe. The concept of a stable world is gone. I think a lot of people will love this book, but some might not be able to take it. It’s very full-on.

What a strange and exciting book. Does that bring us to Age Proof: The New Science of Living a Longer and Healthier Life by Rose Anne Kenny?

I think this book will appeal to lots of people. Well, we’re an ageing society. And it’s not only that we are all ageing, but also the workforce is aging. There are not enough people to contribute to the economy, so people are soon going to have to work into their seventies and even eighties if we’re not going to become economically distressed.

Rose Anne Kenny is a professor of gerontology at Trinity College, Dublin. She does take a scientific approach to this subject, but she peppers the subject a bit with her own experiences and with conversations with her own patients, which is, I think, a nice way to do it.

To humanise the science, yes.

It ends up a bit more of a self-help book than the others, without a doubt.

Kenny gives us the statistics, the evidence for longevity and happiness. Friendships, exercise, what you eat… everything that you might predict but she actually gives the evidence for it, and it’s such an easy read. It’s not necessarily challenging, but at the same time you think, ‘Goodness, that really is the truth.’ It’s important for older and younger people too to think about longevity. The chances are that someone like yourself will have to work full-time until you are 70 or 75.

Yes, when I got my mortgage, we agreed that I’d likely be working until I’m 70 at least. It’s just the way things are going.

So you want to stay healthy. There’s a test at the end, which you can do at any age, to see how you are doing. Kenny has been involved in putting together a massive database with people from across Europe. So she has the statistical norms for all sorts of things for all sorts of ages, so you can do this test and see how your levels of anxiety compare, for instance—which is obviously very bad for you, as you might imagine—but also, how long you can stand on one leg. That sort of thing. Then you can pick up your score. I personally couldn’t bear to do it!

The book is beautifully written and really interesting. Of all the shortlisted books, it’s probably got the most popular feel, after all, everyone is interested in living for a long time.

Quite. Well, just one more book in our list of the best 2022 popular science books. This is  Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial by Professor Peter Stott.

This is a hugely chilling, but massively well-informed book. Obviously, a lot has been written already about climate change, but this should not put people off. The thing about Peter Stott is that it was he and his colleagues who were trying to persuade the world and particularly the powers that be that not only was global warming happening, but it was human activity that was making it happen. At the beginning, the consensus was that, well, the sea temperatures are going up, the snow is melting, but this is just something happening to the universe, this is not anything to do with us.

And there was an enormously frightening and powerful lobby that wanted to discredit everything that Stott and his colleagues had shown. There was such malevolence, such nastiness from the oil lobby, that the threat to Stott and his colleagues was serious. Stott and his colleagues were bullied in meetings and in court and their emails were stolen.

And all that time, the media was obsessed with this idea of false balance, giving equal airtime to self-styled experts. But what did they know? What had they studied? What had they done? What had they written? Stott explains this very well—he’d be asked on to the BBC to present his case, followed by a person who was given exactly the same amount of time to argue against him, who was actually a self-appointed crackpot with no evidence. It is so important that if there is scientific debate, the level of expertise of the debaters is honestly stated and the argument is equally informed on both sides.

It is satisfying that, now, every sensible person in the world knows that Stott and his colleagues were right. So this is a story of persistence, resilience and bravery. I like to think of it as the power of science: that, in the end, the scientific evidence will win out. It might take a long time, but it does. And that, of course, is what the Royal Society is all about.

Part of our best books of 2022 series.