How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

The new picture dispels the long-standing idea that living systems must be regarded as machines. There never has been a machine made by humankind that works as cells do. This is not to deny that living things are ultimately made of insensate and indeed inanimate molecules: we need no recourse to the old idea of vitalism, which posited that some fun

As philosopher of science Daniel Nicholson puts it, “The view that genes are the primary causal agents of all the phenomena of organismic life is not well supported by the findings of contemporary biology.” This much, at least, seems uncontroversial. And yet—and yet!—these correlations persist, and genotypic changes and phenotypic changes often tra

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

Too often, causation in biology, as indeed in the world in general, has been assumed to start “at the bottom” and filter up—so that, for instance, characteristics at the level of an organism’s traits are deemed to be “caused” by genes. As we’ll see, we can gain a better understanding of how life works, and how to intervene in it effectively, when w

We know that, to solve difficult challenges, it is sometimes best not to seek a particular, prescriptive answer by reductive means, but instead to give people relevant skills and then trust them to find their way to an effective solution—one that can be altered and adapted as circumstances dictate. We can now see that by organizing our human system

it is surely not the case that life is just a dizzying mess of fine details in which every aspect matters as much as any other. That can’t be true, because no highly complex system can work that way. If this were how organisms are, they would fail all the time: they would be utterly fragile in the face of life’s vicissitudes.

the notion of a gene has partially filled a void exposed by social change. We are in, they said, “a time when individual identity, family connections, and social cohesion seem threatened and the social contract appears in disarray.” Perhaps society has seized on a scientific idea that seemed to offer consolation when the traditional support of reli

So long as we insist that cells are computers and genes are their code, that proteins are machines and organelles are factories, the picture that emerges is a clumsy marriage of the mechanical and the anthropomorphic. Life becomes an informational process sprinkled with invisible magic.

Favored metaphors change over time, but—and this is less often appreciated—that does not simply mean that one supplants the other. The concept of “vitalism” might be traced back to the Aristotelian soul and is generally regarded as obsolete in biology today, but in fact we’ll see that it still survives in cryptic forms, most particularly in the way