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

Favored metaphors change over time, but—and this is less often appreciated—that does not simply mean that one supplants the other. The concept of “vitalism” might be traced back to the Aristotelian soul and is generally regarded as obsolete in biology today, but in fact we’ll see that it still survives in cryptic forms, most particularly in the way

The number of possible distinct states that our cells adopt is far, far smaller than the number of ways one cell could conceivably differ in detail from another. Likewise, there are only a limited number of tissues and body shapes that may emerge from the development of an embryo. In 1942 the biologist Conrad Waddington called this drastic narrowin

as we become more knowledgeable about where and when to intervene in life’s processes, we can start to think of life itself as something that can be redesigned. Efforts to do so systematically began with genetic engineering in the 1970s, but that typically only worked well for the simplest forms of life, such as bacteria. What’s more, it was limite

Evolution does not select from an infinite palette: there are specific patterns and shapes in space and time that arise out of the complex and dynamic interactions between the components of biological systems, much as there are common features of cities or animal communities, or of crystal structures or galaxies.

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.

it is surely not the case that life is just a dizzying mess of fine details in which every aspect matters as much as any other. That can’t be true, because no highly complex system can work that way. If this were how organisms are, they would fail all the time: they would be utterly fragile in the face of life’s vicissitudes.

“In the future, attention undoubtedly will be centered on the genome, with greater appreciation of its significance as a highly sensitive organ of the cell that monitors genomic activities and corrects common errors, senses unusual and unexpected events, and responds to them, often by restructuring the genome.”

There is, then, no unique place to look for the answer to how life works. Life is a hierarchical process, and each level has its own rules and principles: there are those that apply to genes, and to proteins, to cells and tissues and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system. All are essential; none can claim primacy. As Nobel l