Reviews

“Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep. It explores the fundamental mechanics of biology and leaves the reader full of awe and wonder. More than this, by reframing how we talk about the latest scientific discoveries, How Life Works has exciting implications for the future of the science of biology itself. I could not put it down.”

“Nearly all the neat stories that researchers routinely tell about how living cells work are incomplete, flawed, or just totally mistaken,’ according to this bold report. Science writer Ball explains how advances in biology have upended traditional understandings of how organisms develop and reproduce. The most revelatory material pushes back against the notion that DNA constitutes the ‘blueprint’ for life. . . . The author takes glee in tearing down scientific shibboleths . . . and his penetrating analysis underscores the stakes of outdated assumptions. . . . Provocative and profound, this has the power to change how readers understand life’s most basic mechanisms

“Ball has the rare ability to explain scientific concepts across very diverse disciplines. In his book How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology he employs that understanding to introduce the reader to the profound changes taking place in the life sciences. As researchers understand in ever-greater detail how sensitive, sophisticated, and purposeful different living organisms can be, Ball explains the turn away from a purely mechanical view of life to one that embraces the inherently dynamic, complex, multilayered, interactive, and cognitive nature of the processes by which life sustains and regenerates itself.”

“Ball’s new book offers a much-needed examination of exciting, cutting-edge findings in contemporary biology that is likely to dramatically transform our understanding of living systems—what they are (and, even more importantly, what they are not!), how they are organized at different levels, and the way they develop over time. It will be of interest not just to professional biologists and students of biology, but also to historians and philosophers of science, as well as to anyone curious to learn about the current state-of-play in twenty-first century life science.”

“In showing that complex life is more ’emergent’ than ‘programmed,’ Ball takes on many conventional notions about biology. ‘We are at the beginning of a profound rethinking of how life works,’ he writes. Evolution has consistently invented new ways of creating living beings, and it will continue to do so. ‘The challenge,’ writes the author, ‘is to find a good way of talking about these vital stratagems,’ and his latest book offers plenty of food for thought for scientists in disciplines from medicine to engineering. A bold effort to create a new language that forces a ‘rethinking’ of ‘thinking itself.”

There is so much that is amazing. When Ball tackles issues, any textbook chalkiness gets blown away… For Ball, the possession of agency — and purpose, and even meaning — is precisely how you might characterise life. Life, then, is not the servant of the selfish gene. Life happens at other levels. In the cell. In the organism. In us.