How Life Works

<p>Over the past two decades or so, biology has undergone a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works &ndash; the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more &ndash; have been exposed as incomplete, misleading or wrong. The popular narratives of biology have not kept pace with these changes; instead we have been encouraged to view the processes of life as a black box within which the details are too dizzyingly complicated to contemplate.<br><br><i>How Life Works</i> opens up that black box and shows life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. It explains that there is no unique place to look for the answer to how life works: it is a hierarchical system of many levels, each with its own rules and principles: genes, proteins, cell