How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

Not upto the expectations

It’s a polemic, written against grotesquely simplified strawman viewpoints; instead of getting to the science of it, the author seems to wander everywhere taking potshots at invisible antagonists.

This book brings together much of the current research and theory of cell biology. This is an immense subject (read Nature magazine for the latest research) and May did an excellent job of summarizing for the non scientist. The book requires slow reading and concentration but the effort is worth it.Four stars because it was not necessary to refer back to old theories as often. Science moves forward and new knowledge replaces old.

Read this book 2 times. Reading other reviews " slow, repetitious, " what book are they reading?? Phillip Ball has always been a great writer. Every one of his books in a gem, but here he hits for the stars... Yes, there is new view of biology and Ball's idea of new metaphors is quite important. Read it, think about it and discuss and argue. That's how life works.

Fantástico libro!

The prevailing view is that Darwinism blended with the Modern Synthesis comprise the Theory of Evolution. The Modern Synthesis developed in the early part of the twentieth century contends that changes in the genome constitute the blueprint of evolution. The aim of the book is to challenge this assertion.Charles Darwin theory of evolution by natural selection was focused on the organism: on the emergence of 'endless forms most beautiful' from the individual's struggle to survive and reproduce in competition with others. The Modern Synthesis that blends Darwinism with genetics sees it differently. It completely brackets our the organism and considers evolution in terms of changes in the frequencies of gene variants (alleles) in population. That view rationalizes a great deal about biology, but at the same time, it hardly does justice to the complexity of causes underlying evolutionary change.In evolutionary genetics, organisms are taken for granted once you have the genes: the genome is the program according to which the organism is made, and simply needs to be read out. But once we have recognized that there is no such blueprint, that genes and genomes are mere ingredients for creating a palette of phenotypic possibilities, the equation changes.It is precisely because the toolkit for making an organism (or a phenotype) has many levels and is imbued with a range of generative potential that sometimes small, almost trivial changes at the genetic level are able to produce marked differences in phenotypic form and function.The picture that emerges for metazoan animals, at least, is that evolutionary changes to genes don't so much define as refine phenotypes. Tissue morphology and body shape are generated by higher-level principles involving, e.g., interaction between cells or the influences of diffusing morphogens, which serve to produce a particular developmental menu: a set of morphological landscape. The role of natural selection is not to build these slope patterns but to select among them: to cull ones that do not work, or not well enough.To be viable, a genetic mutation needs to be insulated from the phenotype by organizational layers that can integrate it into a coherent whole. Consider Darwin's famous Galapagos finches, their beaks so seemingly well adapted to the specific function they had to fulfill in different evolutionary niches. At face value it is not easy to evolve a beak shape and keep it functional: how, e.g., do you avoid the lower beak not becoming outsized with respect to the upper one? How are small, gradual changes to the beak kept proportionate to independent changes in the head and musculature? But developmental mechanisms smooth out such potential inconsistencies: a single signaling molecule influences the size of the whole beak. Thanks to the way development actually works, you have already mechanisms in place for interpreting information to make some sort of coherent change, and the evolution of novelty is then not so difficult. The buffering provided by the higher levels of organization reduces the likely lethality of genetic change.Variation involve the tweaking of a core system within genomes that supplies the basic ingredients of all higher animals.The anatomy-generating core system is highly conserved in metazoa ( multicellular eucaryotes). It doesn't change much among different species, simply because that would be disastrous. These DNA regions are effectively excluded from the list of targets at which genetic change could generate viable phenotypic variation. They just cannot be tinkered. The tinkering happens only around the edges.Thus the requirement for evolvability - and this applies to all organisms, even bacteria - needs more than mere replication (plus mutation) of genetic sequences. It demands the existence of coherent entities called 'reproducers'. Such entities might be regarded as the fundamental evolvable unit of all organisms, and we might equate it with the cell itself. They have hierarchical organization that absorbs and adjusts to the unexpected. The 'reproducer' perspective offers an organizational theory of evolution by natural selection, which has the organism (and its struggle for existence) back at its core, as it was in Darwin's original theory.

Die Gene sind nicht der Bauplan des Lebens, sondern die DNA stellt nur die Basis zur Verfügung, auf dem sich das Leben auf allen Ebenen eigenständig, flexibel und robust organisiert. Beginnend mit der bahnbrechenden Entschlüsselung des menschlichen Genoms im Jahre 2000 und verbunden mit der falschen Hoffnung, damit den Stein der Weisen für die Zukunft des Menschen gefunden zu haben, arbeitet sich der Autor über die DNA die Hierarchie des Lebens (d.h. Gene, RNA, Zellen, Proteine, Netzwerke, Zellen, Gewebe und Körper) nach oben, um mit der synthetischen Biologie und den Zukunftsaussichten zu schließen. Nur wenn wir von der reduktionistischen zu einer vielfältigen (holistischen) Sicht auf das Leben kommen und diesem auf allen Ebenen eine eigene Autonomie für Entscheidungen („agency“) sowie Ziele, Zwecke und Bedeutung zugestehen, werden wir das Leben richtig verstehen. Nur damit werden Erkenntnis-Fortschritte in der Evolution des Lebens sowie in der medizinischen Forschung möglich sein.Ein Buch, das auch einem bereits informierten Leser einiges abverlangt. Viele Beispiele, teils auch aus anderen Bereichen (z.B. Linguistik) machen den Stoff anschaulich, auch wenn das ein und andere Mal Details in der Regulation von Stoffwechsel-Vorgängen einen den Faden verlieren lassen. Trotzdem ist die Lektüre lohnend und fasst den heutigen Erkenntnisstand in Zell-, Molekular- und Entwicklungsbiologie gut zusammen. Mit diesem Buch gibt der Autor der biologischen Forschung einen neuen Rahmen für zukünftige, fruchtbare Projekte und Fragestellungen.Eine bezeichnende Zusammenfassung der aktuelle Situation in der Biologie liefert der Autor mit den nachfolgenden Zitaten des Systembiologen Jeremy Gunawardena aus Harvard:„Einige, wenn nicht viele Forscher beanspruchen mit ihrer Arbeit Wahrheit zu liefern. Es wäre aber genauer zu sagen, dass sie nur eine bessere Metapher dafür liefern.“ und„Uns fehlt ein angemessener theoretischer Rahmen, in dem beide Sichtweisen von Einzelteil und System gleichermaßen gültig sind“