How Life Works
About
Background summary — AI-generated; not source-grounded.
How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology is a 2024 book by the science writer Philip Ball. It argues that the familiar twentieth-century picture of biology — genes as a blueprint, DNA as a program the cell runs, the ‘selfish gene’ — is useful but seriously incomplete. Drawing on molecular and cell biology, Ball presents life as a layered, deeply contingent set of processes in which meaning and causation run in many directions at once: proteins that are flexible and multi-functional rather than lock-and-key machines, cells that behave as agents processing information, and higher levels of organisation that constrain the genes as much as the genes specify them. The book’s practical upshot, which Ball stresses, is humility about intervention: because most traits are polygenic and emerge from this messy interplay, single-gene edits (CRISPR on a monogenic disease) are the exception, and the dream of reading or rewriting an organism from its genome alone underestimates how life actually assembles itself.
In the wiki
- Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding — the book anchors the final third of Ball’s conversation with Tyler Cowen: regeneration in octopuses and axolotls, cells as computers, the limits of the selfish-gene metaphor, and why CRISPR’s promise is bounded by the polygenic character of most traits.
See also
- Philip Ball — the author
- Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding — the episode