How Life Works Quotes

“I don’t anticipate a consensus any time soon on the question of how to define life, but it seems to me that cognition provides a much better, more apt way to talk about it than invoking more passive capabilities such as metabolism and replication. Those latter two attributes might be necessary, but they are means to an end: they’re not really what life is about.”
― Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

“The growth and maintenance of living things like us is a delicate (but also robust) dance of cause and effect, cascading up and down the hierarchy of scales in space and time. This leads to that, but then that creates a new this. It’s for this reason that life can only be understood as a dynamic process of becoming—from conception to the grave.”
― Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

“The importance of noncoding DNA is greater for us than for simpler organisms. Around 90 percent of the bacterial genome is protein-coding. For C. elegans, that figure is 25 percent. For humans, as we’ve seen, it’s a mere 2 percent at most. Of the genome sequences that we share with other mammals, the majority are in noncoding regions, implying that this stuff is what matters to being a mammal. Just how much of that noncoding DNA really makes a difference is another matter. It’s probably not 80 percent—ENCODE member Bradley Bernstein guesses that 30 percent might be a more realistic figure. But even then, he says, “there is a huge amount of regulatory DNA [and thus RNA] controlling the 20,000 protein-coding genes—way more than coding DNA.”
― Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

“The idea that DNA makes you what you are is not in itself as pernicious as eugenics, but it's a hair's breadth away if you are not careful, and is just as flawed.”
― Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

“Sometimes this rush to the next Big Data challenge is justified with the implication that that's what we needed all along. And yet all this information is sometimes gathered in the absence of what science really needs to make progress: hypotheses to test. It's almost as if there is a belief that insights will simply begin to seep out of the data bank once it reaches a critical mass.”
― Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology