The number of possible distinct states that our cells adopt is far, far smaller than the number of ways one cell could conceivably differ in detail from another. Likewise, there are only a limited number of tissues and body shapes that may emerge from the development of an embryo. In 1942 the biologist Conrad Waddington called this drastic

testing that approach on a problem with a known solution. He set out to see if the methodology generally used in biology would work to show how a transistor radio works. How would that approach generally go? First, he wrote, researchers would persuade funders to let them buy a stack of radios that all work the same way, which they will dissect and

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

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

as we become more knowledgeable about where and when to intervene in life’s processes, we can start to think of life itself as something that can be redesigned. Efforts to do so systematically began with genetic engineering in the 1970s, but that typically only worked well for the simplest forms of life, such as bacteria. What’s more, it was

All the same, Berzelius added a fruitful notion. Rather than postulate some “vital force”—“a word to which we can affix no idea”—we should recognize that “this power to live belongs not to the constituent parts of our bodies, nor does it belong to them as an instrument, neither is it a simple power; but the result of the mutual operation of the

Evolution does not select from an infinite palette: there are specific patterns and shapes in space and time that arise out of the complex and dynamic interactions between the components of biological systems, much as there are common features of cities or animal communities, or of crystal structures or galaxies.

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.