At its heart are two essentials: one is the science mantra 'It's more complex than we thought', and the other is that the public at large - and even many biologists - have put too much focus on genetics as the central shaping force of life and the inner development and workings of organisms, coming close to ignoring the many other layers of complex systems that make life what it is and drive evolution.
You would think we would have got the message about 'It's more complex than we thought,' and the associated concept that 'It's more complex than we tell you at school or in science TV shows' by now. It's true of all the sciences. In physics, for example, we've known that the reality is more complicated than 'light is wave' for over a century now. But biological systems are so vastly more intricate and messy than anything dealt with in physics. Until recently, even those working in the field typically underestimated that complexity.
Philip Ball does not ignore genes - they get plenty of coverage. But he also shows how, for example, messenger RNA transcription from DNA as a whole (not just genes) has wide consequences for the inner workings of life. Time and again, what most of us think we know is shown to be a painfully limited view of what's really going on. For example, many of us may have the concept of proteins folding in specific orderly ways being central to the workings of organisms - yet we discover here that plenty of proteins (often the most significant ones) operate with part or all of them 'intrinsically disordered' in loose, floppy chains that 'are not strongly committed to a particular "shape"'. Ball piles on layer after layer of complexity, showing how so much of the mechanism of development and life depends on the interaction of these different layers and of emergent properties as much as anything coded in DNA.
This is a big book (460 main pages) with an awful lot going on. Like any biology book, there are very many labels for the various molecules, mechanisms, systems and more. So often in other biology books this means that the reader struggles to keep up with what's happening, but here the amount that has to be retained is extremely well controlled - I never felt, as I often do with a biology book that I had got totally lost in the terminology. I may have suggested in the past that Ball can be a touch wordy and demanding of readers - but that didn't come across to me at all here.
One repeated theme is metaphors and analogies. At one time, an organism's genes were often portrayed as its 'blueprint'. More recently that has been dismissed, as a genome clearly doesn't contain everything you need to construct a particular organism. It has been described instead as being more like a software program for an automated factory where the other bits of the biological system are the actual factory - but Ball demolishes this kind of approach too, pointing out that many of our mechanical analogies simply don't work because biological systems are so very different from mechanical equivalents.
I'm struggling to find any fault here. To be really picky, early on Ball mocks Francis Crick's (apparently fabricated) announcement in the Eagle pub in Cambridge that in deducing the structure of DNA they had discovered 'the secret of life': 'to use a very crude analogy, that's a bit like a literary scholar proclaiming to have the "secret of Dickens" only to whip out an abridged dictionary and saying "It's all in here!"' While what Ball says is true, he's really only arguing about the use of the word 'the', in the sense that it doesn't seem too much of an exaggeration to say that understanding the structure of DNA uncovered 'a secret of life'.
Inevitably, there is significant use of metaphors and analogies throughout. At one point Ball tells us 'You might suppose that sticking a methyl "bump" onto the DNA strand will disrupt the ability of RNA polymerase to transcribe it, rather like a scratch or bit of a dirt on a cassette tape.' Cassette tape, grandad? This is particularly amusing as a couple of pages later he distinguishes two processes as being like a mark made in pen versus one lightly pencilled in, and wonders what we will do when these 'fading analogies from a different era of editing' no longer work - I think cassettes will be forgotten significantly sooner. Another odd analogy describes a suggested process as 'not unlike hoping that a billiards shot will send the balls colliding in just the right way to reform the triangular array in which they were first sequestered.' As there are only three balls in billiards, I think the intended analogy was snooker. (Or perhaps pool, as the book uses US spellings and conventions.)
I had to try very hard to find anything negative to say. This is Ball's best by a mile (and that's saying a lot). I have always been conscious of how little I understood biology. How Life Works has shown me that I seriously underestimated my ignorance - in a good way.
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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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