DNA

The German cultural scientist Ulrich Raulff has written that horses have as many meanings as bones. In the archaeologist William Taylor’s new history of horses and humans, we meet all those bones. Found in thawing permafrost, in caves, and buried ceremonially in graves in Siberia and Chile, the bones are cracked open by Taylor to show how the horse evolved in the Americas before its early encounters with human hunters. Does a 5,000-year-old worn tooth tell us it once chomped a bit? Does damage to vertebrae indicate a rider? Then came domestication, transforming the species from near extinction to tool and symbol on every major landmass on the planet. After

In 1982, the philosopher Karl Popper suggested that ‘science may be described as the art of systematic simplification’. In this mind-stretching book, Philip Ball seems to wish to prove Popper’s statement both wrong and correct. On the one hand, Ball is a clarifier supreme. It is hard to imagine a more concise, coherent, if also challenging, single volume written on the discoveries made in the life sciences over the past 70 years. The author is a former editor of Nature and has been privy to the flow of cutting-edge results coming from the world’s leading research programmes over the past decades. How Life Works has a sense of up-to-the-minute authority.

What makes a garden is an increasingly pressing question, in the light of what Jinny Blom, in her witty and wise What Makes a Garden: A Considered Approach to Garden Design (Frances Lincoln, £35), calls ‘hairshirt hubris’. By that she means the refusal of some gardeners to call any native plant a weed or any slug or aphid a pest. She wishes to inject a little sense into what has become an ill-tempered dialogue between ‘traditional gardeners’ and the self-deniers who cannot see gardens as anything but parcels of sacrosanct earth, in which any major intervention by a human is to be regretted. But to Blom, garden-making is one antidote