How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

Arguably it is here that we begin to see how life is not a mechanical process that transmits information and organization steadily and predictably along linear pathways from genes to ever increasing scales. Instead it is a cascade of processes, each with a distinct integrity and autonomy, the logic of which has no parallel outside the living world.

the notion of a gene has partially filled a void exposed by social change. We are in, they said, “a time when individual identity, family connections, and social cohesion seem threatened and the social contract appears in disarray.” Perhaps society has seized on a scientific idea that seemed to offer consolation when the traditional support of reli

One of the fundamental messages of this book is that we cannot properly understand how life works through analogies or metaphorical comparison with any technology that humans have ever invented (so far). Such analogies may provide a foothold for our understanding, but in the end they will fall short, and will constrain and even mislead us if we don

As philosopher of science Daniel Nicholson puts it, “The view that genes are the primary causal agents of all the phenomena of organismic life is not well supported by the findings of contemporary biology.” This much, at least, seems uncontroversial. And yet—and yet!—these correlations persist, and genotypic changes and phenotypic changes often tra

Meaning is not some mysterious force or fluid that pervades the vacuum. No; life is what creates such meaning as exists in the cosmos. Only for living things—or, to speak more generally, for things that, by their very nature, are imbued with purposes and goals—can there be a “point.” I suspect it is in fact precisely by virtue of being a thing that

The organism simply needs mechanisms for evaluating the value of that feature and acting accordingly. Looked at this way, life can be considered to be a meaning generator. Living things are, you could say, those entities capable of attributing value in their environment, and thereby finding a point to the universe.

Just as there are physicists who will tell you that everything that happens can ultimately be explained by physics alone (it can’t), and chemists who tell you that in the end biology is just chemistry (it isn’t), so by asserting the primacy of the gene, geneticists are establishing an intellectual pecking order when they attribute more to genes tha

So long as we insist that cells are computers and genes are their code, that proteins are machines and organelles are factories, the picture that emerges is a clumsy marriage of the mechanical and the anthropomorphic. Life becomes an informational process sprinkled with invisible magic.

Multicellular animals, or metazoa, emerged during the Precambrian period; the earliest fossil evidence for them dates back to around 635 million years ago.