LONDON: Consider the average human: all life is there. A man is not just 99 per cent chimpanzee; he is also 90 per cent mouse, 30 per cent lettuce and more than a smidgeon of brewer’s yeast as well. The logic of Darwinism dictates that if life’s variety stems from a common origin, then each living thing represents the latest edition of evolution news, complete with an encrypted story-so-far, spelled out in life’s four letter alphabet. DNA isn’t that easy to read, but Neil Shubin is about to have a go with what may or may not be the book of the year, but is certainly a candidate for title of the year: Your Inner Fish (Allen Lane).

This “journey into the 3.5 billion year history of the human body” is a reminder that if life began in the sea, then quite a few fishy features must still survive, even in humans. Shubin is a palaeontologist, and not the only one to contemplate the scales of history, and our place in the social swim. Richard Fortey, already the author of three stunning books on the history of the planet and the life that colonised it, will also deliver Dry Store Room No 1 (HarperCollins) this month. This “secret life” of the Natural History Museum in London might seem a text for specialised appetites. But the museum is a repository of astounding riches: animal, mineral, vegetable and fossil, and behind almost every one of its 70m specimens is a story of eccentric pursuit, intemperate scholarship, intellectual enchantment and scientific skulduggery. Like Shubin, Fortey tells a story that puts us in our place, and perhaps helps explain how we got here.

Robert Oppenheimer led the Manhattan project that developed the atomic bomb. He also tried to warn the world of the consequences: in the course of doing so he antagonised the US establishment and became the victim of a political witch-hunt in McCarthy-era America. Kai Bird and Martin Sherman tell the story once again in American Prometheus (Atlantic). The fire from heaven, of course, was delivered to a city in Japan in August 1945.

In February, Andrew J Rotter produces Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb (Oxford). The message of Manhattan should have been: “never again”. But nine nations now have their own stockpiles of atomic weaponry, and with ominous signals to and from Iran it won’t hurt to learn afresh the scorching lessons of triumph and tragedy.

The new year science book bonanza includes Marcus du Sautoy’s Finding Moonshine (Fourth Estate), a study of the secrets of symmetry and a window on to the murky, mesmerising world of mathematics. Another television regular, Michio Kaku, returns in February with Physics of the Impossible (Allen Lane) billed as a scientific tour beyond science fiction, fantasy and magic. This pedagogy of paradox – lessons in the science we haven’t got, and perhaps cannot have – is the latest in a genre launched 12 years ago by Lawrence Krauss’s little knockout, The Physics of Star Trek.

Sean B Carroll picks up the challenge of the creationists with The Making of the Fittest (Quercus): another look at what DNA tells us about the two-billion-year process that turned a primitive blob in the primeval ooze into Paris Hilton in her Jimmy Choos. The blurb tells us that such evidence points to the end of the “rancorous, distracting debate over the validity of the theory of evolution”. If only . . .

My personal bet for the most nourishing book of the month, however, is John Reader’s Propitious Esculent (Heinemann). There’s nothing humble about the spud, as any aficionado of Redcliffe Salaman’s The History and Social Influence of the Potato will confirm. But Salaman’s epic appeared in 1949 and there is now so much more to tell about these tempting tubers: think global history with a side order of fries.

No peek into the future of science publishing is complete without a mention of John Gribbin, author of more than 100 volumes and yes, there he is again with his co-author Mary Gribbin and Flower Hunters (Oxford) in the spring; or Philip Ball, in there twice, once with Nature’s Patterns: A Tapestry in Three Parts (Oxford) and again with Universe of Stone (Bodley Head), a look at the world of Gothic that culminated in the cathedral of Chartres. Richard Dawkins edits The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing and Maryanne Wolff takes a look at the science of reading – how does the brain turn marks into Das Kapital and squiggles into Biggles in Proust and the Squid (Icon).

The New York physicist Alan Sokal became a famous writer without being read by anyone: in 1996 he delivered a parody of post-modernism entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” and the editors of a learned journal published it, seemingly without reading it.

It wasn’t just rubbish, it was risible rubbish. Beyond the Hoax (Oxford) promises to be Sokal’s cheerful challenge to dodgy debate and intellectual self-indulgence, and I expect no less of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science (Fourth Estate).—Dawn/ The Guardian News Service