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.

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.