How Life Works

A User’s Guide to the New Biology

De: Philip Ball

Narrado por: Philip Ball

Enticingly read by the author, Philip Ball.

'An essential primer on humanity’s ongoing quest to understand the secrets of life . . . Excellent . . . Ball is a terrific writer.' – Adam Rutherford, The Guardian

A cutting-edge new vision of biology that proposes to revise our concept of what life is – from Science Book Prize winner Philip Ball.

Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.

In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.

Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the nature of life, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2023 Philip Ball (P)2023 Macmillan Publishers International Limited

Reseñas de la Crítica

Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep . . . How Life Works has exciting implications for the future of the science of biology itself. I could not put it down. (Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction)

Ball has the rare ability to explain scientific concepts across very diverse disciplines. . . . He explains the turn away from a purely mechanical view of life to one that embraces the inherently dynamic, complex, multilayered, interactive, and cognitive nature of the processes by which life sustains and regenerates itself. (James Shapiro, author of Evolution)

Offers a much-needed examination of exciting, cutting-edge findings in contemporary biology that is likely to dramatically transform our understanding of living systems (Daniel J. Nicholson, coeditor of Everything Flows)

Poor story

Sorry Phillip, I did not like this one bit.

I loved Flow, Branches and Shapes, they are among my all time favourites. But this one just confused me!

The author (from a position of authority as a member of the Nature editorial board, but not on his personal field of expertice) uses the old story telling trick of creating tension between the "old" view and this "new" view to pull the reader into his narrative.

And it is true that our understanding of DNA and how cells utilize this molecule of heredity has advanced enormously in the last 25 years. That DNA's role is much more complex and dynamic than was initially thought back in the 50's, 60's and 70's should not come as a surprize. We started by thinking that there might be something transmitting information from generation to generation, then identified the substance, deciphered how it encoded proteins, figured that the junk code encoded regulatory functions, and as of lately we have been able to show how configurable yet robust living systems are and that certain characteristics of cellular and multicellular life is emergent.

Biochemists have pointed this out for decades that much of the biochemical pathways are surprisingly similar. They couple together in reconfigurable pathways depending on local states. That is a given for life (as biochemical pathways are the essence of life). That spatial and mechanical states also couple into this should not come as a surprise (as all organisms are constrained by these states).

That DNA contains the recipes to create the tools that on scales orders of magnitude larger than the primary molecules result in emergent behaviour is of course surprising, but if you have ever looked at the field of biophysics or complex systems this should again not be a surprise. And indeed this has been pointed out over the years.

The author creates a tension with a paradigm that went out of fashion in the early 90's of e.g., humans sharing 98% of its genes with chimps. This is correct if you look at the gene part of DNA, but only about 2-3% of DNA codes for proteins. The rest was thought to contain junk because we could not make sense of it. Once we could (make sense of it), it opens up this very fascinating story of integration, feedback, re-usable themes and emergent dynamics and function. It is by no means "The end of the machine". We are finally understanding the basic themes for constructing life, concepts that can be re-used and re-purposed to create complexity. That this happens in a mostly liquid or soft condensed matter state where thermal noise can be harvested to drive processes in a very energy efficient manner is by no means new.

I feel the wonderful story of how life works could have been told in a much more structured way. There is no need to tear down the old insights, just because they could not move beyond the existing knowledge frontier at the time. The author seems to tear everything down to just build it up again, pretty much as it was, but with some small tweaks and additions. It is very confusing.

If you are looking for deep, and well structured reads on this topic I would spend my time on books by Nick Lane (e.g., Power, Sex, Suicide - a tour de force on cellular evolution) or Max S. Bennets "A brief history of intelligence". Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldorp is also good.