Every year, the judges of the Royal Society Science Book Prize put together a shortlist of the smartest, sharpest, funniest science books of the previous twelve months. We asked the chair of the 2024 panel—the leading evolutionary biomechanics researcher Professor John Hutchison—to talk us through their picks of the best new popular science books.
You are chair of the judges for the 2024 Royal Society Science Book Prize, which seeks to reward the best new works of popular science. What were you looking for, when you were reading the submissions?
The prize is about the best science communication in books. So: reaching a broad audience in a novel way, that is informative or clever or funny, or a combination of those things. And, most importantly, being accessible to a general audience—the science-interested public.
That’s a very broad remit. It’s not just pure science, either; we are interested in all of what you might call the ‘STEM’ subjects—science, technology, engineering and mathematics. There were quite a few technology and engineering books submitted for consideration.
I would assume that the hard sciences—the numerical sciences—would be hardest to translate into prose. Is that the case?
It’s definitely a challenge. One of the shortlisted books is a great example of overcoming the challenge of translating statistics or higher mathematics into words. There can be a big hurdle to overcome in terms of making it palatable to the public, who can be phobic of mathematical formulae. You have to hold an audience’s attention, and a diverse audience might not have their attention held by a narrative composed of numbers.
You must be talking about Everything is Predictable: How Bayes’ Remarkable Theorem Explains the World by Tom Chivers. It strikes me as the kind of book that might have helped me when I was struggling through my statistics modules as an undergraduate.
I wish I’d read this book years ago. Bayesian statistics is all over my area of research—and, as the book argues, it’s all over everywhere, and it has long been so. But the general public is not aware of this, and even many scientists, I think, are not aware of Bayes’ theorem.
In a way, the book is pretty simple. It’s about one equation, which calculates the probability of something, given a piece of evidence and your confidence in that evidence. There’s a way you go through, calculating the probability of some event, adjusting your calculations as new evidence comes in—and that’s it, really. But the author does a great way of explaining how this is counter-intuitive to a lot of people.
If you have a 1 in 80 chance of getting cancer, then we tend to think: well, that’s your chance of getting cancer. Actually, it’s more sophisticated than that. You also need to consider: what’s your chance of not getting cancer. So you think backwards, in order to think in a Bayesian way. He provides a lot of great examples.
It’s a great counterpoint to what he calls ‘frequentist’ statistics, which is something we use all the time in statistics. Any time you see a p-value—the probability of something left to chance—that’s frequentist. If a p-value is less than 0.05, that means there’s only a 5% chance of it being explained by a random event.
That’s usually considered the threshold of statistical significance.
So that’s frequentist thinking. It’s how we tend to think. Bayesian statistics is against that kind of frequentist approach, it’s a totally different way of looking at things. I’m still coming to grips with explaining this to someone else; it’s challenging, and not intuitive. This is not a fault of the book, but a fault of the way my mind works, and the way we are trained to think about likelihood.
I feel instincts often do lead you astray in statistics. But perhaps reading about Bayes and how he came to his conclusions could help us understand it more holistically.
I think it does help. Chivers’ point is that Bayesian logic is all about degrees of probability. There is no black or white thinking, it’s not ‘true’ or ‘false.’ You might never know something with absolute certainty.
We might look around the world and see how many white swans there are, but we might never know if there is a black swan out there. But the more observations of white—not black—swans we make, the lower the likelihood of there being black swans. We are constantly building towards a vanishing level of uncertainty.
You hear all the time about the latest health claims from science research. Red wine is good for you! Then: Red wine causes cancer!
Right, findings often conflict.
So, how do you adjust your beliefs with that new evidence? You adjust your slider for the probability of red wine being good or bad. That’s a kind of Bayesian thinking, ultimately. But it’s pretty challenging, because there is so much evidence pulling you in different directions.
Thank you, that’s helpful. The second book on the shortlist is Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution by Cat Bohannon. Why is it one of the best popular science books of 2024?
It’s about the neglect of the importance of female anatomy and physiology in our understanding of mammalian evolution, and much more broadly in society. It walks through the evolution of the female form, showing how massive those changes were in terms of their effect on the biology of our distant ancestors, which then affected all descendant mammals in certain ways. Bohannon then marches through the evolutionary tree, through different ancestors (or their proxies), ultimately to us—explaining how our biology as a species, not just as women, has been shaped by the influence of female biology.
“Most importantly, the books should be accessible to a general audience—the science-interested public”
Of course, half of our ancestors were females, but science has been sexist. There’s been a huge male-centric bias in the study of the evolution of mammals—and of organisms in general. The classic example of sexual selection might be giant, extinct male Irish deer growing gigantic antlers. This is an example of animals forming elaborate structures in order to compete for females. That, therefore, influenced their evolutionary fitness and propagation of their lineage. Those kinds of stories have been very powerful and infiltrated into our society, which has its own biases. We don’t similarly tend to hear as much about sexual selection linked to elaborate structures of females.
The author is rightly offering a corrective to that male-centric view of evolution. Sure, males are very important, but it takes two sexes. The influence of female reproduction and physiology are clearly very powerful and have been so ever since the first mammals evolved.
Yes. Basically, it goes from the ancient history of mammals, all the way up through time. Fossil evidence tells us about how milk production worked in the deep time of mammalian history, and so forth.
Fascinating. Let’s keep moving through your shortlist of the best popular science books of 2024: can we talk about Kashmir Hill’s Your Face Belongs to Us: The Secretive Start-Up Dismantling Your Privacy?
This reads like a mystery, although we already know the outcome. This is a work of truly rigorous investigative journalism by the reporter who broke the story about this company, Clearview AI, in The New York Times: how it is using facial recognition in startling new ways, and how it has sold its software to police organisations who are using it to try to identify criminals from videos.
That has a lot of dangers in terms of privacy, and also in the bias that these kinds of algorithms can have. There’s a stronger likelihood of wrongly identifying a black person as a perpetrator, for example, due to the data set it is trained on.
The book reads like a thriller. Hill walks you through the whole process of investigating this case, mostly chronologically. The creator of Clearview AI started from humble beginnings, taking academic research papers and cobbling them together to create new code that could analyse more and more data, in more and more sophisticated ways. Along the way, they were gathering together as many public images of faces they could from the internet, making a database that grew and grew and grew.
As the code grew, they got more people involved to make it work better and better. Eventually, it had a kind of breakthrough, started to be recognised and used by more and more businesses, and ultimately by law enforcement. Now it’s a multi-million-dollar company.
Other people were working on facial recognition technology with AI, but big companies—like Google and Facebook—decided they would draw a line and not go further with this technology. I think that says something; if mega-corporations are not willing to go so far, for what they say are ethical reasons, yet this company went there, and has a huge database, who do these facial data belong to? As they really are out there in the public domain, are those data free game for any purpose (or should there be more nuance)?
Hill makes the fascinating point, that maybe we own our own biometric data, and we should be fighting more for this ownership—because it’s valuable data that is very important to our privacy. I thought that was a great direction to take the story, and I was absolutely gripped by the book from beginning to end. It kept blowing my mind, all along the way. I kept shaking my head, like: Wow, I can’t believe this happened, and nobody stopped it.
It sounds like this book is an act of public service.
I think people should read it, and I think they will enjoy reading it. It’s an exciting tale, and an important one.
The next book on the 2024 shortlist is Gisli Pálsson’s The Last of Its Kind, an exploration of the human causes of mass extinction. What did the judges admire about this book?
This book is about the great auk, a large, flightless bird that went extinct in recorded history. The great auk was a close relative of living auklets and also puffins. This is a very scholarly work where the author has gone through historical records, some of which were hidden away in difficult-to-access archives, and reconstructed what happened.
Two British people went to Iceland to find the last of the auks in the 1840s, which were reportedly on an outlying island. Extinction was a known phenomenon, but was thought to be something that happened to inferior species—they were kind of doomed to go extinct anyway, and not by human causes. In this case, through their very careful investigations and oral histories—interviewing people around Iceland who had seen auks or heard about them— as well as looking at the physical evidence, they discovered the great auk had gone extinct. It took quite a while for this to dawn on them, because it was a new idea: not only that they went extinct, but specifically that they went extinct because of people hunting them for food and for feathers for women’s hats. This was a shock to Victorian naturalists—the idea we could drive a species to extinction.
One of the investigators died shortly thereafter and wasn’t able to take this work further, but the other became a passionate conservationist and helped form a lot of important aspects of UK law, which still exists today, regarding the protection of wild birds.
It’s a powerful story of how people who love birds discovered a world-changing perspective on what we can do to the environment—that we, our greed, can destroy a species. That’s a pretty humbling revelation.
I live in the far north of Scotland. I was on a small outlying island recently, and I came across a cairn with a plaque marking the site of the last great auk in the UK. It’s funny how certain species have taken on an almost mythic status.
Amazing! I need to visit that place. The great auk iconic for extinction, almost like the dodo. But the details of the dodo’s disappearance in the mid-1600s is more mysterious, much less documented. Whereas the great auk’s extinction only happened in the mid-1800s. That’s pretty recent.
Well, the next book we’re going to talk about brings us very much into the present. This is Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality by Venki Ramakrishnan. It’s a book that compiles the latest scientific understanding of ageing and longevity.
So, Ramakrishnan is a world-famous Nobel-prize-winning scientist, a former President of the Royal Society, writing about his area of expertise. He’s one of the people who fundamentally established our understanding of the ribosome, a structure within the cell that helps ‘print out’ our proteins (“protein synthesis”), so to speak.
Ramakrishnan puts together all the evidence we have about the molecular and cellular biology of ageing and of cancer—and how this relates to mortality, and makes a very interesting point that I had never thought about, which is that there is a tension in the way our cells work in holding off ageing, but also holding off cancer. The two work at loggerheads; you don’t want to get cancer, but also you don’t want your cells to grow too old and to get too damaged to function. Preventing one can enable the other.
Hence there’s this constant tug of war, and a multitude of repair mechanisms are active all over the place trying to prevent ageing or cancer. Ultimately, they are not perfect mechanisms. So damage or mutation accumulates, cells become non-functional or cancerous, and so on and so forth. We age, and that is what that is.
Ramakrishnan’s point along the way is: well, what can we do with this information? Can we use this growing body of evidence about how we age in each domain—how the ribosome works, how DNA repair mechanisms work, and so on—to help us live longer? And: how long could we live if we do?
The oldest people today reach about 120 years. Is that a hard limit for us? Or could we get to 150? 1000? Some people have made bold claims, like perhaps the first person to reach 1000 years old might even be alive today. Ramakrishnan looks at the evidence, and, basically, it’s promising that we can live better, at least. We can probably do some good things, tweak these limits, help people live healthier lives into their old age—maybe not live longer, but at least be healthier when they are older.
That has some promise. But Ramakrishnan explains why Methuselah-like outcomes, where people live into their thousands—or even past 200—are probably over-optimistic. A disturbing thought is that quite a few people funding this research are billionaires hoping to become immortal themselves. So there is some likelihood that these technologies, as they emerge, will be so cutting edge and expensive that they remain the province of the extremely wealthy and privileged. Thus we might have a separation of the people that are healthier, living longer, squandering their money; versus the people who can’t do that; much more so even than today. And that will create even worse social inequality, potentially, if this kind of thing continues unfettered.
The technologies are great, and there is great promise. But Ramakrishnan is also sounding a warning. Like: Hold on, we’ve got to watch out for how this knowledge is actually used. Which reminds me of the Clearview AI book about facial recognition. You have to wonder where this train is headed.
Absolutely. If the wealthiest people in society are living much longer than the poorest, there is also less opportunity for redistributing wealth through inheritance tax. You can see how the financial future of a society like that could get wildly out of whack.
Indeed.
We have one more book on your 2024 shortlist of the best popular science books, and I think this might also venture into a future province of the billionaires. Why is A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith one of the best popular science books of the year?
That’s right, some of the same names, the same mega-billionaires, appear in A City on Mars, Your Face Belongs to Us, and Why We Die.
But yes, this book is—as the title implies—about the possibilities of us settling in space. There are two things that are very cool. First, it’s written by a husband-and-wife couple, one of whom is a science writer and the other is a cartoonist. They have pooled their talents to write a really engaging, fun narrative that ties together a huge array of multidisciplinary lines of evidence of what it would take to achieve different stages of living in space.
How hard is it to reproduce in space? How hard is it for babies to grow? We essentially have no idea. How hard would it be to live on Mars? Well, there are lots of reasons why it is really, really hard—far worse than any environment here on Earth—and we have no idea yet how to truly solve the problems of living there. “We’ll figure it out as we go along” probably is a foolish strategy.
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith evaluate the steps we might be able to take if we wanted to settle in space, and a lot of those steps still need to be achieved here on Earth. We even are getting ahead of ourselves by thinking we could settle the moon this century. It’s too optimistic in how our technologies are going to progress; we know so little about certain key things.
Going somewhere like Mars is incredibly challenging, because it might take a year to get there. How do you establish supplies going back and forth? If you’re not self-sufficient and able to grow your own resources, which you won’t be able to do until you have a sizeable city, there’s a kind of Catch-22 situation.
The moon is much more achievable. Settling on the moon is a good start. They talk about where on the moon might be doable, and what there is on the moon that we could use—which is not much.
Right. You read stories of the most incredible hardship among early colonists from history, the difficulties they faced and the horrible outcomes they suffered. And that was staying within the same relative climate, the same atmosphere, all those kinds of things. So although it sounds quite glamorous, I’m not sure I’m brave enough to be an early colonist on Mars.
Well, it sounds like we are very far away from that. I certainly wouldn’t go.
They do a nice job of covering what we have achieved in extreme environments here. Settling on Antarctica is brought up as a good example; we’ve done pretty well with that. But that’s nothing compared to settling on Mars.
There was also an experiment called Biosphere II, which put eight people in a closed ecosystem in the 1990s and saw how long that group of people could persist with no input of resources. Those people had to grow everything they ate, which is a good simulation of how it might be settling on another planet. They didn’t last long, and things went pretty horribly wrong socially. So that gives good cause for caution if we are not able to do something even that basic. We haven’t solved the problem of forming a society that is completely isolated.
The Weinersmiths also get into space law: who owns space? Who could own part of the moon, or part of Mars, and what are the implications? They go through the laws that actually exist, and are not even binding—more like moral codes—and they evaluate what might be possible.
That sounds completely fascinating.
Yes, it’s a good read and also very funny, which I think is important for this kind of book, where the message could be taken as a bummer. But it comes across as very reasonable and amusing.
As a final question: Did reading the books submitted for this prize leave you feeling optimistic about the state of popular science writing?
Oh yes. It was a treasure trove! There were more than 250 books that I had to at least skim through, personally, as Chair. I winnowed it down to 52 that we considered together as a panel. Just choosing those 52 was so hard, because there were so many more that I still want to read.
It was a delightful cornucopia of very, very diverse books. I think this shortlist of six is a great sample of that diversity: a little bit of everything. We have cell biology, evolution, extinction—so quite a bit of biology—but also statistics, space science, and AI. It’s all very relevant and covers a good spread of the STEM subjects. The rest of the submissions were even broader.
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John Hutchison
Professor John Hutchinson is a Professor of Evolutionary Biomechanics, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His research straddles the fields of evolutionary biology and biomechanics, with an emphasis on how very large animals stand and move and how locomotion evolved in different groups of land vertebrates across major evolutionary transitions and transformations.
Professor John Hutchinson is a Professor of Evolutionary Biomechanics, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His research straddles the fields of evolutionary biology and biomechanics, with an emphasis on how very large animals stand and move and how locomotion evolved in different groups of land vertebrates across major evolutionary transitions and transformations.
