The organism simply needs mechanisms for evaluating the value of that feature and acting accordingly. Looked at this way, life can be considered to be a meaning generator. Living things are, you could say, those entities capable of attributing value in their environment, and thereby finding a point to the universe.

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.

Arguably it is here that we begin to see how life is not a mechanical process that transmits information and organization steadily and predictably along linear pathways from genes to ever increasing scales. Instead it is a cascade of processes, each with a distinct integrity and autonomy, the logic of which has no parallel outside the living world.

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

What if instead a radio simply is not the right analogy—if biology doesn’t work like any engineered system we have ever created? What if its operational logic is fundamentally different? Then we will need something more than a better formal language. We will need a new way of thinking—albeit not one that need invoke any mysterious vital force. I be

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

The COVID vaccines, especially in the rapidity of their creation and testing, have been one of the greatest triumphs of modern science. And yet in some ways we seem little better off than we were in the Middle Ages, seeking medicines (including COVID antivirals) largely by trial and error, and having to hope that, if we’re infected, our god or blin

One of the fundamental messages of this book is that we cannot properly understand how life works through analogies or metaphorical comparison with any technology that humans have ever invented (so far). Such analogies may provide a foothold for our understanding, but in the end they will fall short, and will constrain and even mislead us if we don

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