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SUNDAY SCIENCE: HOW LIFE WORKS – A USER’S GUIDE TO THE NEW
BIOLOGY BY PHILIP BALL  
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Adam Rutherford
January 11, 2024
The Guardian
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_ An essential primer on humanity’s ongoing quest to understand the
secrets of life _

Grains of pollen under an electron microscope, Science Photo Library

 

You might think, with the completion of the Human Genome Project 20
years ago now, and the discovery of the double helix enjoying its
70th birthday this year, that we actually know how life works. In
physics, the quest for a so-called Grand Unifying Theory has
preoccupied the most ambitious minds for generations, alas to no
avail. But in the life sciences, we managed to find four grand
unifying theories in the space of 100 years or so. Three are well
known: cell theory – all life is made of cells, which only come from
existing cells; Darwin’s evolution by natural selection; and
universal genetics – all life is encoded by a cypher written in the
molecule DNA. The fourth, no less important, goes by the chewy name
chemiosmosis, and describes the way that all living things live by
drawing fuel from their surroundings and using it in a continuous
chemical reaction. In summary, life, made of cells that extract energy
from their environment, comes modified from what came before. Job
done; suck it, physicists!

However, biology is messy, and though we have these laws in place to
describe all life on Earth, people like me remain gainfully employed
because our understanding of how chemistry becomes biology is far, far
from complete. These grand unifying ideas are unbeatable, but they
lack detail, and in biology the devil lies at a molecular level of
complexity that is hard to understand. Nowhere, as Philip Ball (a
physicist by background) points out in his excellent new book, was
this more starkly apparent than when an invisible virus turned the
world upside down in 2020, killing millions, infecting many more. But
while for some people it was lethal, or created myriad symptoms that
would last for months or even years, for others it was akin to a mild
cold, or even entirely symptomless. We do not know why this was the
case.

How Life Works is a much more appealing title than the rather overused
question of “what is life?” that was the one given to a series of
influential lectures and an accompanying book in 1944 by Erwin
Schrödinger – more famous for his hypothetical box containing a
non-committal quantum cat – and ever since, this question has been
borrowed by many wishing to seem profound. I find it largely
pointless, and somewhat antithetical to scientific thought itself. We
should be less concerned with what a thing is, and rather more focused
on what a thing does. To define a living thing is a kind of
creationist question, for it implies an immutable ideal type, but this
runs counter to one of our grand unifying laws: the Darwinian
principle that living things are four-dimensional, ever changing in
time as well as space.

We crave narrative satisfaction in untangling systems, but evolution
has a 4bn-year head start on us

But it’s an idea that is deeply embedded within our culture: a vital
force, the spark of life, an elusive but essential quality that
distinguishes the quick and the dead. What is life? Tricky to pin
down, but we know it when we see it, to paraphrase US Justice Potter
Stewart in 1964 (admittedly, he was referring to an intangible
definition of pornography).

Ball points out that we rely on metaphors and analogies to explain and
explore the wicked complexities of life, but none suffice. We are
taught that cells are machines, though no machine we have invented
behaves like the simplest cell; that DNA is a code or a blueprint,
though it is neither; that the brain is a computer, though no
computer behaves like a brain at all.

It’s a funny thing that we strive to reduce the most complex
entities in the known universe – living things – to a simple
description. We crave narrative satisfaction in untangling systems,
but evolution has a 4bn-year head start on us, and had no plan, nor
any concession to ever being understood by one of its clever fruits.
James Watson, half of the pair who published the double helix
structure of DNA in 1953, once wrote that the other half, Francis
Crick, had burst into the Eagle pub in Cambridge and declared that
they had discovered the “secret of life” (though in 2017 Watson
himself admitted that he’d invented the whole scene for dramatic
effect). Ball points out that we don’t try to do this with art, or
other matters of extreme beauty: no reader or scholar tries to isolate
and distil the “secret of Dickens”.

These simplifications and analogies arise because it’s not good
enough to simply deploy the condescending mantra “it’s a bit more
complicated than that” and expect students not to be overwhelmed and
bored. But Ball wonders if the models we use in our teaching reduce
complexity without acknowledging that it’s there, as if we are
trying to get that complexity out of the way so we never have to
think about biology again. I am reminded of a better mantra, that of
the statistician George Box: all models are wrong, but some are
useful.

Ball is a terrific writer, pumping out books on diverse subjects at a
rate that makes me feel jealous and inadequate

Ball builds a nice analogy with language, as we often do in genetics.
How do you get from the dictionary to literature he asks? Well, it’s
something like: words (+magic) > sentences (+magic) > chapters and
books. The equivalent in a living organism is: genes (+magic) >
proteins (+magic) > cells (+magic) > tissues and bodies.

Except of course the magic is not supernatural, it’s just the stuff
that we don’t yet know, or can’t explain simply, which is the meat
of how life works. The book follows the flowchart: there’s an
exploration of the fundamentals of genetics, of how the way we teach
and think about genes is not reflected in what geneticists know. There
are no specific genes for complex human traits or behaviours, yet this
misconception – often deployed in headlines as “Scientists
discover the gene for … ” – is culturally embedded. Emerging
evidence suggests that the way we teach genetics to children
reinforces not only this error, but a version of racial essentialism
long abandoned by science.

Ball scales up from genes to proteins, and cells and networks, and in
doing so we get stuck into the unexplored magic that gets us from
chemistry to biology, all the while dismissing the egregious idea of
nature v nurture: “I cannot stress enough,” he intones, “life
works at all only in relation to its environment.”

Ball is a terrific writer, pumping out books on incredibly diverse
subjects at a rate that makes me feel jealous and inadequate.
There’s a wealth of well-researched information in here, some
details that are a bit chewy for the lay reader, and I question the
utility of black-and-white illustrations of proteins that are
unrevealingly complex and thus unenlightening. But other than that,
the book serves as an essential primer on our never-ending quest
to understand life. Ultimately, “what is life?” is a question
without a useful answer. “How does life work?” is the question
that should drive the next wave of aspiring biologists from the cradle
to the grave.

_ __ADAM RUTHERFORD is a scientist and author of Where Are You
Really From
[[link removed]] (Wren
& Rook). As a PhD student he was part of a team that identified the
first genetic cause of a form of childhood blindness. He worked as an
editor at the journal Nature, and has written several books beginning
with CREATION, on the origin of life and synthetic biology, which was
shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Prize. _

_On radio, he presents BBC Radio 4’s weekly programme Inside
Science, and with Dr. Hannah Fry, the Curious Cases of Rutherford and
Fry. He's also written and presented documentaries on subjects ranging
from the history of sex, the evolution of morality, to the MMR-Autism
scandal, several award winning television documentaries, including
The Cell (2009), The Gene Code (2011), the Beauty of Anatomy (2014),
and Playing God, on the rise of synthetic biology for the BBC’s
long-running science series Horizon, appeared on programmes including
James Cameron’s The Story of Science Fiction (2018), University
Challenge (2016) and worked on a number of films as a scientific
consultant including Annihilation (dir. Alex Garland, 2018), Ex
Machina (dir. Alex Garland, 2015), Life (dir. Daniel Espinosa,
2016), Bjork: Biophilia Live (dir. Peter Strickland, 2014), Kingsmen:
The Secret Service (dir. Matthew Vaughan, 2014)._

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_Betsy Reed_

_Editor, Guardian US_

_How Life Works by Philip Ball is published by Picador (£22). To
support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy
at guardianbookshop.com
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Delivery charges may apply._

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Tools of the Wild: Unveiling the Crafty Side of Nature
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By Michael Haslam and Abigail Desmond
Sapiens
Once considered a uniquely human activity, tool use has been spotted
across diverse species. It’s time to rethink what tools reveal about
their users’ intelligence and evolution.
February 7, 2024

* Science
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* biology
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* chemistry
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* DNA
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* Evolution
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* genetics
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* protein
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* cells
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* networks
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