Book Review - How Life Works: A user’s guide to the new biology
This is one of the most fascinating biology books I’ve ever read.
Two themes stayed with me since I finished the book a couple of weeks ago and gave myself time to think. Firstly, biology is much more complex than I was taught at university and have believed for the past 40 years. Secondly, genetics is not the prominent shaper of life that I thought it was.
How Life Works: A user’s guide to the new biology. Philip Ball. Published: 2023, London, Picador
I took a while to understand what he was saying about the role of genes because of his assertion that they are not the blueprint that describes all life. This is probably not news to a scientist paying attention to this field of study. However, to someone, like me, with a career that encompassed modern pharmaceutical drug and microbiome therapeutic intervention, this was a bolt out of the blue. Aren’t we supposed to believe that the latest shotgun genomic technologies will help us determine the root causes of cancer and identify members of the gut microbiota associated with myriad disease states and associated cures?
The author makes the case genes don’t contain adequate information to cope with the infinite combination of variables encountered by an organisms as it develops, matures and reproduces. Instead, he says, our genetic code is more like a resource that an organism uses to supply what is needed as its environment changes. From page 301:
“Genes don’t encode the rules of how life unfolds, but merely supply the components that enact those rules”
He shows how layers of complexity that involve things like DNA, RNA and proteins and their interactions are fundamental to how life works. From page 248:
“The growth and maintenance of living things like us is a delicate (but also robust) dance of cause and effect, cascading up and down the hierarchy of scales in space and time. This leads to that, but then that creates a new this. It’s for this reason that life can only be understood as a dynamic process of becoming – from conception to the grave.”
I finally lost all confidence in my pre-conceived ideas when I read that it is not true that folding in specific orderly, tertiary structural ways is required for proteins’ function. Many proteins, in fact, exist within the cell as partly disordered and flexible chains apparently awaiting a purpose (my words). He describes this attribute as promiscuous. This isn’t the last time he uses non-biological terms to describe biological activity.
I was most challenged when it came to accepting the concepts of “agency”, “information”, “meaning”, and “purpose” as they apply to biology. The author rejects all thoughts of theology, however, but explains how biologists must find ways to describe the bigger picture. From page 336:
“Biology looks uncannily teleological. That thought disturbs some biologists no end…. one of the big challenges for biology is to develop a rational, productive framework for understanding concepts such as agency, information, meaning and purpose. ... Without that big picture, we risk ending up with the equivalent of a detailed description of everything about a complex machine’s operation except for an understanding of what it actually does.”
He explains that the more we learn about biology, the more we observe complex processes resulting in apparent purpose. From page 214:
“Complex organisms seem wired to enable…so-called causal emergence. Emergence refers to the appearance of overall behaviour in a complex system of many parts that can’t be predicted or understood by focusing just on what those parts themselves are like. … To talk about causes in a meaningful sense, we have to acknowledge that there are higher-level entities and influences that must be recognized as every bit as real and fundamental as their constituent parts, and not just as arbitrary ways to aggregate them. These are the causes of what transpires – and they are not just the sum of lots of microcauses.”
This is a book with 460 main pages. Importantly for me, it is well endowed with notes, bibliographies and indexes. There were times when I initially struggled with the specialized terminology, but I never became totally lost, if I took my time…! Overall, I think the book is accessible to non-specialists like me.
In closing, the author won me over with this book because he spends so much time emphasizing that we can’t understand how life works if we accept demonstrably false theories from the past. From page 448:
“No argument ever gets sorted out when it is about the wrong thing to begin with.”
He painstakingly describes a model for life that can be used to explore, for example, human health and longevity. That model holds promise for future developments in the fields of nutrition, and medical and microbiome therapeutic intervention.