
We need new metaphors that put life at the centre of biology | Aeon Essays

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
... See morePhilip Ball • How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
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.
Philip Ball • How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of... See more