We need new metaphors that put life at the centre of biology | Aeon Essays
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
... See morePhilip Ball • How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
“It would not be good news to learn that we are all roped together intellectually, droning away at some featureless, genetically driven collective work, building something so immense that we can never see the outlines,” biologist Lewis Thomas writes in The Lives of a Cell (1974). Humans understandably prefer to believe in their own agency, even if ... See more
Real Life Mag • Colony Collapse - Real Life
One after another, the greatest figures in physics seemed to develop an unexpected late-career interest in the mystery of life itself, even taking abrupt shifts toward the formal study of biology.