How Life Works

A User’s Guide to the New Biology

(paid link)

I think I put this book on my get-at-library list thanks to an interesting review by Adrian Woolfson in the WSJ. The author, Philip Ball, is a "freelance writer", and was an editor at Nature for over twenty years.

The book was considerably more daunting and detailed than I expected. (I had no idea there were so many different kinds of RNA!) As often happens when I'm out of my depth, I fell into my "looked at every page" mode for some stretches. My personal rules say this still counts as "reading". And when Ball slows down a bit and writes for a "more general audience" (me), he's quite interesting and accessible.

One of Ball's major points here is a pushback against vulgar reductionism, that posits the genome as kind of computer program that produces… well, us, and every other living thing on Earth. It's important, but seems to be overhyped. Like I kept saying about (for example) The 1619 Project: it's an important story, but it's far from the whole story. Ball tries to tell the whole, very complex, story.

Come to think of it, it's pretty amazing how you and I came to be, starting with a fertilized ovum that commenced dividing, and dividing, and differentiating, and … well somehow, wound up with brains, lungs, eyes, veins, livers, fingers, bones, etc., all in the right place, with skin on the outside instead of somewhere else. And all working together pretty well. Especially amazing when you look at the unsharp, floppy, shaky tools involved: proteins with amino acid chains that have to be folded just so (or pretty close), with affinity sites placed in just the right place to link to… well, like I said, it works well enough to get us out of bed in the morning.

Ball explicitly denies "intelligent design", saying confidently that this was all a matter of fumbling, dumb-luck evolution. And I suppose I buy that at about an 80% credence level; the other 20% is saying: "Oh, really? Suuuure. Pull the other one." For example, the multicellularity we take for granted: the evolutionary jump from unicellularity seems to have happened only once in the entire gigayears of history, and it's unclear what the evolutionary advantage of it was (page 222).

Bottom line, a pretty obvious one: life is complex, there's a lot we don't understand.

In breaking away from reductionism, Ball is free to engage in metaphors of his own choosing. He ascribes causality as an emergent property of sufficiently complex arrangements, causality that can't be found in any of the components. He has an entire chapter on "Agency", which is (he says) "how life gets goals and purposes". This is a red flag for some, because it edges away from the strict determinism a lot of people cling to, making room for their bugaboo, free will.

So (unsurprisingly) it turns out my favorite determinist, Jerry Coyne, has kind of a bee in his bonnet about Ball. See, for example his "review of a review": Yet another misguided attempt to revise evolution.