The state of nature

Steve Connor, The Independent's science correspondent, weighs up the short-listed entrants for the 2003 Aventis prize

The most prestigious prize in science book publishing will be announced tonight at the Science Museum in London. The general prize of the Aventis prizes for Science Books is worth £10,000 - and far more in terms of kudos and book sales. It is the 15th anniversary of the Aventis prizes and a distinguished panel of judges, chaired by the author Margaret Drabble, has come up with a short-list that spans the world of scientific endeavour, from the determinism of the gene to the infinity of space. One of these authors will tonight join a celebrated list of science writers which includes Stephen Jay Gould, Jared Diamond and Stephen Hawking.

Small World: Uncovering Nature's Hidden Networks

Mark Buchanan (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99)

What is the connection between the nervous system of the humble nematode worm, the national electricity grid of the US and the six billion people who inhabit the planet? The answer, it appears, is that they all follow the same general rules of the "small world" structure, a set of principles that describes how seemingly-complex phenomena can be reduced to a simple set of commonalities. The classic example is the "six degrees of separation" that is supposed to define the interrelatedness of the human population. Everyone, by and large, can be connected to everyone else through no more than about six other people.

This was amply illustrated by a German newspaper a few years ago which found that a kebab seller in Frankfurt could be linked to his favourite Hollywood actor - Marlon Brando - via six links of personal acquaintance. The kebab seller, an Iraqi immigrant, had a friend living in California who worked with the boyfriend of a woman who was the student acquaintance of the daughter of the producer of a film in which Brando starred.

A new generation of physicists believe this "small world" phenomenon is no coincidence, rather the manifestation of the hidden and powerful design that binds the world together. Buchanan artfully describes this new field of complexity with supreme simplicity.

Reckoning with Risk: Learning To Live With Uncertainty

Gerd Gigerenzer (Penguin paperback, £8.99)

It is never easy to write about mathematics and its sidekick, statistics. Yet the science of probability touches each of us every day of our lives, whether it is the risk of getting caught up in a traffic jam and being late for work, or the chances of getting lung cancer from smoking. Gerd Gigerenzer, a former professor of psychology, tackles the subject in a neat way with plenty of case histories. He illustrates his points with little stories about risk involving real people, such as Susan who went through a nine-month nightmare having been diagnosed, wrongly as it turned out, with HIV.

Gigerenzer tests his readers with brain-teasers and conundrums about risk and probability. What is the probability, for instance, that at the end of their first glorious day together, Adam and Eve will see the sun rising again the following morning? Given that Adam and Eve have not seen the sun rise before, the answer gets intriguingly complicated, involving the rule of succession introduced by the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1812.

In the post-BSE world, when politicians have realised that they can no longer say there is no risk of anything, this book gives the public the intellectual weaponry to see through unwarranted hype and the next scare story.

The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy and the Accelerating Cosmos

Robert P Kirshner (Princeton University Press, £19.95)

One of the most astounding discoveries in recent years is the realisation that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate by a mysterious force called "dark energy". Robert Kirshner, a renowned astronomer and supernova specialist, tells the remarkable story of how this phenomenon was discovered and what it means for the field of cosmological theory.

It was the American astronomer Edwin Hubble who, in the 1920s, was the first to find that the universe was expanding, but more recent measurements showing that this expansion is speeding up - rather than staying static or slowing down - have stirred the world of astronomy and cosmology. "A universe controlled by dark energy points to a deep gap in our understanding of submicroscopic aspects of empty space: the properties of a vacuum," Kirshner writes.

The problems that dark energy poses are formidable. No laboratory experiment and no physical theory predicts the amount of dark energy that the astronomical observations predict. "Solving the mysteries of the accelerating universe has produced another delicious puzzle to investigate," he says. In many ways, this is not an easy book to read, but this is perhaps understandable given the gargantuan nature of the ideas it is trying to convey.

Right Hand, Left Hand: the Origins of Asymmetry - from the Big Bang to the Human Mind

Chris McManus (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20.00)

Did you know that the colour test card shown when BBC television goes off the air has been deliberately reversed to show a naturally left-handed child writing with her right hand? Or that there is no truth in the myth that there are more left-handers in families bearing the surname Kerr or Carr than the rest of the population? Or how about the suggestion that Jack the Ripper was left-handed because five of his victims had their throat cut from left to right?

Left and right-handedness is a fascinating feature of living organisms and extends to more than whether someone prefers to use one hand or the other. Handedness and asymmetry extends to almost every aspect of nature, from the biological molecules that are essential for life, to the way the organs are arranged inside the human body.

Chris McManus, a professor of psychology, once spent a summer in Italy as a student, looking at the testicles of characters in classical and Renaissance art to check for signs of asymmetry. He found that the majority of artworks he inspected depicted the right testicle higher than the left, which was drawn or sculpted larger than the right. In reality, it is indeed that case that the right testicle is higher, but it is also larger than the left testicle. McManus explains why so many artists got it wrong in this fascinating and thought-provoking book.

The Blank Slate

Steven Pinker (Allen Lane, £25 and Penguin paperback £7.99)

This is the book that is supposed to bring the debate over nature and nature up to date. Steven Pinker is an old hand at this prize, having been short-listed three times. The blank slate in question is the condition we are all supposed to be born with - if you are an antideterminist who believes that the environment and our upbringing control our destiny rather than our genes. Pinker advocates an inherited basis of human nature which pervades much of our lives. But he believes it is far from being the corrosive force often depicted by left-leaning intellectuals and the politically correct.

Yet understanding our biological inheritance can explain many traits, such as the proclivity of men to sleep around and the tendency of women to deal with socially abrasive scenarios through verbal reasoning rather than physical aggression. Pinker's book is as much about philosophy as science. Although he handles sometimes difficult issues and science, his fluid writing style makes it easy to read and to digest. This is the bookie's favourite to win tonight.

Where is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life

Stephen Webb (Copernicus Books, £17.50)

Enrico Fermi, the renowned physicist, provoked one of the greatest paradoxes in science. If intelligent life is commonplace in the universe, then the vast numbers of planets and galaxies means that there must be so many aliens with the ability to travel vast distances that we should by now have seen them. So, he asked colleagues over a lunch, where is everybody?

Stephen Webb offers an entertaining explanation, well 50 of them to be precise, including "aliens exist but have decided not to communicate with us", and "aliens exist and are already living among us". One of the most unusual explanations is that aliens exist but they haven't made their presence known because they have set aside our part of the Milky Way as a "wilderness area" where life is allowed to develop under its own steam without any outside interference. Webb calls this the "zoo scenario" because of its obvious similarities to the way to tackle endangered wildlife on Earth. Perhaps the most depressing explanation for why we haven't been visited by aliens is that advanced civilisations only survive a short period before they invent and use the means of their own mass destruction.