'An essential primer on humanity’s ongoing quest to understand the secrets of life . . . Excellent . . . Ball is a terrific writer.' – Adam Rutherford, The Guardian
'Ball is a ferociously gifted science writer . . . There is so much [here] that is amazing . . . urgent . . . astonishing.' – The Sunday Times
A cutting-edge new vision of biology that proposes to revise our concept of what life is – from Science Book Prize winner Philip Ball.
Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.
In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.
Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the nature of life, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.
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How Life Works 9781529095982 Hardback
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How Life Works
The book tells step by step about biological function, DNA cell level to overall organ function in an easy to understand meeting. I miss a discussion about the origin of life.
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Reconsidering the notion of purpose in biology
For centuries teleology has been taboo in the natural sciences, and for good reason. But biology, specifically, has been in need of rehabilitating the notion of purpose. Studies of vertebrate physiology, ethology, and development are finding a new emphasis on purposive behavior fruitful. But now, B…
For centuries teleology has been taboo in the natural sciences, and for good reason. But biology, specifically, has been in need of rehabilitating the notion of purpose. Studies of vertebrate physiology, ethology, and development are finding a new emphasis on purposive behavior fruitful. But now, Ball argues that other areas in biology may also benefit from analyses using some variant of goal-directedness as an interpretation. How exactly to develop this and apply it to organisms without complex nervous systems is a huge, fascinating, controversial question. And this book is an excellent start to trying to answer it. Ball has already proven his worth with a whole series of spectacular works on science directed mostly to non-scientists or to scientists in other specialties, and his rare ability to summarize well is needed in an endeavor such as this, which requires an interdisciplinary approach. The only limitation, in my opinion, is an ideological overemphasis on cognition and consciousness as models for purpose, since these cannot be attributed to non-vertebrates (and of course similar invertebrates such as octopus) without considerable awkwardness. This is a frequent philosophical limitation from certain schools of academic philosophy, especially in the UK and US. So I am hoping for a next book that instead would take the approach of neurophysiologist Gyorgy Buzsaki, from a more continental school of philosophy, that would focus on motility as the, ahem, driving force leading to consciousness and cognition as needed activities in a complex interaction of organism and environment. Motility is much more generalizable than cognition or consciousness, even down to the level of chemotaxis, so it is more promising as a way to articulate agency and what might be called proto-agency.
- Authors:
- Ball, Philip
- Year Published:
- 2024
- Country of Publication:
- United Kingdom
- Format:
- Hardback
- ISBN:
- 9781529095982
- Number of Pages:
- 560
- Publication Date:
- 18/01/2024
- Publisher:
- Pan Macmillan
- Place of Publication:
- London
- Language:
- English
- SKU:
- 9781529095982