Thank you Negalley, Philip Ball and Picador for the eArc of How life works.
I loved this book and sat with my teen son to slowly go through this book as he's interested in all around science, He found It just as fascinating as I did and even told his science teacher about it!

It would have been lovely to have some illustrations to go with the wonderful information to break it up a little and made it easier for my sn to work through.

4.5 stars

This is a fascinating book about biology in a broad sense and genetics in a more detailed view. Biotech has been developing rapidly in the past few decades so there´s a lot to catch up with. There are a lot of terms and jargon that most people probably won´t be familiar with, so those with bio/med background will enjoy this book more.

I love reading books about science and how our world works. This is an informative and intriguing book that made me learn a lot.
I appreciated the style of writing and how easy was to understand what I was reading.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

I listened to the audiobook of How Life Works by Philip Ball as well as being given access to an electronic version and thought the whole experience was wonderful.

Since I graduated with a microbiology degree nearly 25 years ago, there have been a lot of changes to the understanding of how biology actually works. Having a gene for something in an individual's DNA doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to get a matching phenotype, there are so many variables relating to gene expression and how the environment of a growing cell changes its behaviour,

The change in biological mindset reminded me of the change in physics from the Newtonian understanding of human-scale bodies moving under gravity to quantum concepts of probability affecting tiny or huge bodies in space. It's a completely different way of thinking about things and perhaps the human brain isn't really capable of fully understanding.

A fascinating book, with plenty to think about and an excellent update from my school days. Thank you to the author and everyone involved in producing the book.

This was fascinating. Ball argues that DNA is not, as the headlines tell us, the blueprint which shapes all life. Such metaphors (another is the cell as a factory) are useful up to a point, but they can lull us into thinking that they provide a complete and accurate picture. Interactions within and between cells are much more complex and unpredictable.

The earlier chapters, dealing with topics such as DNA, RNA and proteins, were more challenging to me as a non-scientist and sent me back to my Biology for Dummies.

However, the chapters on the physics of life, and whether life has cognition, even at the cellular level, were especially interesting. Does it make sense to talk of life having agency and purpose? What are the implications?

You’ll probably get the most out of this if you have a science background, but even as a general reader, I found it intriguing.

‘…Our answer to how life works is, its complicated’ (p.335).

Complexity is the core message of the book. Why did it take 2 doses of anti-Covid vaccine to protect people, and not 1 or 10? The answer is that its complicated… and we don’t know.

Many of the things that we thought we knew, have now turned out to be wrong. We cannot understand life through analogies or metaphors with human technology (p.29), despite Descartes insistence to the contrary. The Genome is not a ‘blueprint’ for life, as bits (transposons) can move around (p.113). And, cutting to the heart of one of the central dogmas: It is not the case that (real) genes exist to encode proteins (p.125), so its wrong to think that around 98% of human DNA is just ‘junk’ (p.125). ‘Genes do not encode the rules of how life unfolds… (they) supply the components that enact those rules’ (p.301). And so on…

Perhaps one of the most interesting ideas in the book is its challenge to biology around ‘agency’ and ‘purpose.’ Historically Science has often defined itself against the teleological argument for God’s existence, by insisting that there is no purpose or design in nature. The author thinks that even raising the question of ‘agency’ can sound mystical, and as if it is opening the doors to ‘intelligent design’ (p.460). The author is clear that those doors need to remain closed. Yet ‘Biology looks uncannily teleological…(and) that thought disturbs some biologists no end’ (p.336). The more we learn about biology, the more we can see complicated processes unfolding to achieve apparent purposes. Is a fear of theology holding biology back from developing its language and modelling? It’s an excellent question, and it is posed thoughtfully.

Throughout the book, carefully targeted chapters gave clear and informative accounts of where biology is ‘at.’ There was a lot of detail, and that made sense in a book challenging widely held ideas. In places, however, the book moved a little too quickly. For example, it mentioned arguments about free will and just dismissed them as ‘tedious,’ and as involving sprinkling ‘causal fairy dust’ (p.372). That was disappointingly simplistic in a book which is supposed to be about complexity. It would have been better not to raise an issue, if the book hasn’t got the scope to deal with it adequately.

Overall, the book was clearly written in language accessible to non-specialists. Around 18% of the book was notes, bibliographies and indexes. I think the book will be enjoyed most by readers who already know a genotype from a phenotype.

These are comments on an ARC (Advanced Review Copy) of the text, which was read digitally in October 2023.

I had high hopes for "How Life Works" given its beautiful cover. Inside, I found a wealth of valuable information, but the presentation left much to be desired. The book, while informative, read more like a manual and could have greatly benefited from the inclusion of illustrations or visuals to break up the overwhelming text. A more visually engaging approach would have made the reading experience a lot more enjoyable.