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A review by archytas
How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology by Philip Ball
informative
mysterious
reflective
3.75
"Put simply, framing the issue of what makes us the way we are as “nature vs. nurture,” and especially “genes vs. environment,” deforms the causal landscape of living systems into a shape it does not fit, and so we can no longer make out what it truly looks like. As with many recalcitrant questions, the way to resolve the “nature vs. nurture” argument is not to answer it but to recognize that it is the wrong question."
This is an odd duck of a book: the third recent book on biology to take on a gene-centric view of biology, along with Siddhartha Mukherjee's Song of the Cell and Aria Alfonso Martinez' The Master Builder. As the title attests, Ball's How Life Works is the most ambitious of the three. Ball, former editor of Nature and committed to communicating complexity, determined to show as much of the complex, messy, impossible-to-untangle science of how bodies work, from the molecular to the organism level. His goal is both to frustrate attempts to oversimplify things, especially the idea of DNA as a blueprint, and to show the various ways that physical and chemical laws play out through biology to create people, inheritance, diversity and change. And that those things are not always the same things.
The book is awash with frustrations. Ball decries the dangers of metaphors but deploys some very simplistic ones in criticising points of view that frustrate him. He frequently name checks issues with concepts he supports, like emergence, or attributing agency to physical processes. I suspect he is occasionally guilty of describing complexity simply to show his audience that this stuff is harder than they suspect to really understand or predict. It is not always convincing, either, in convincing on some of Ball's deeply held beliefs around the ways that life embodies purpose. There are a few too many Dennett quotes.
But I can't help but admire the book's ambition, intent, and yes even execution. I have read literally dozens of books about DNA, but never have I had such a detailed explanation of the actual process of replication, epigenetic activations and the sheer bloody chaos of it all. You can almost visualise the process - much less linear, much more vibrant, than most flattened descriptions make it seem. This serves one of his central arguments - that evolution prioritised developing sophisticated and efficient biological processes over just replicating genes. That our cells can activate and deploy genes in variously innovative and varied ways throughout our bodies might matter just as much as which genes are available for deployment. If a group of genes can all do roughly the same thing, it might be simply which is most efficient to reach that makes a difference. Most of our genes do not code for protein but rather are used in replication processes (we think so much is still unclear), including many strongly identified with rare diseases. In other words, it is all far more intricate than we should expect to be able to simply understand because we've decoded a genome into letters.
This is not to say that Ball decries inheritance. But he does point out that what has been successful in identifying inheritance is the statistic-crunching Genome-Wide Association Studies, which track the correlation between physical disease and genes, not any numerically significant number of attempts to understand *how* genes work. This process is successful in identifying risk but not so much in identifying treatments.
It is all a lot to think about, and if, like its subject matter, this book is messy and occasionally infuriating and often feels slightly too much, it is better by far than the streamlined certainty too ,much of our current science presents.
This is an odd duck of a book: the third recent book on biology to take on a gene-centric view of biology, along with Siddhartha Mukherjee's Song of the Cell and Aria Alfonso Martinez' The Master Builder. As the title attests, Ball's How Life Works is the most ambitious of the three. Ball, former editor of Nature and committed to communicating complexity, determined to show as much of the complex, messy, impossible-to-untangle science of how bodies work, from the molecular to the organism level. His goal is both to frustrate attempts to oversimplify things, especially the idea of DNA as a blueprint, and to show the various ways that physical and chemical laws play out through biology to create people, inheritance, diversity and change. And that those things are not always the same things.
The book is awash with frustrations. Ball decries the dangers of metaphors but deploys some very simplistic ones in criticising points of view that frustrate him. He frequently name checks issues with concepts he supports, like emergence, or attributing agency to physical processes. I suspect he is occasionally guilty of describing complexity simply to show his audience that this stuff is harder than they suspect to really understand or predict. It is not always convincing, either, in convincing on some of Ball's deeply held beliefs around the ways that life embodies purpose. There are a few too many Dennett quotes.
But I can't help but admire the book's ambition, intent, and yes even execution. I have read literally dozens of books about DNA, but never have I had such a detailed explanation of the actual process of replication, epigenetic activations and the sheer bloody chaos of it all. You can almost visualise the process - much less linear, much more vibrant, than most flattened descriptions make it seem. This serves one of his central arguments - that evolution prioritised developing sophisticated and efficient biological processes over just replicating genes. That our cells can activate and deploy genes in variously innovative and varied ways throughout our bodies might matter just as much as which genes are available for deployment. If a group of genes can all do roughly the same thing, it might be simply which is most efficient to reach that makes a difference. Most of our genes do not code for protein but rather are used in replication processes (we think so much is still unclear), including many strongly identified with rare diseases. In other words, it is all far more intricate than we should expect to be able to simply understand because we've decoded a genome into letters.
This is not to say that Ball decries inheritance. But he does point out that what has been successful in identifying inheritance is the statistic-crunching Genome-Wide Association Studies, which track the correlation between physical disease and genes, not any numerically significant number of attempts to understand *how* genes work. This process is successful in identifying risk but not so much in identifying treatments.
It is all a lot to think about, and if, like its subject matter, this book is messy and occasionally infuriating and often feels slightly too much, it is better by far than the streamlined certainty too ,much of our current science presents.