Philip Ball: How Life Works

 

Philip Ball is a science author and communicator, who is a member of a very rare group: someone who writes with as much authority as the researchers he is writing about. Most popular science writing (this inadequate term is all I have to describe his writing, although it is hardly “popular”) is purely one-way: researchers do what they do, and a science writer (or communicator) writes up in plain language an account of what they do, and tries to put detailed research into some kind of meaningful framework. But Ball wants to go further: not just to describe what some scientists do, not just to create new metaphors, but to contribute to the debate himself. He’s not afraid to state how many scientists were wrong, although that tends to be about dead scientists, and he diplomatically anonymises any negative remarks about what he is doing, such as the researcher who stated his work was dangerously simplifying the situation. 

Ball is also remarkable as a physicist who writes with impressive detail about biology – not many writers can do that. He’s even prepared to tackle topics that most biologists wouldn’t dare approach, it seems: to talk about the nature of life, and even to discuss agency, that highly fashionable world, which is today being applied to hundreds of human situations, but which has never before, in my experience, been attributed to cells. Mind you, I wouldn’t be surprised to read that test tubes had agency these days, but that’s another matter. Ball’s basic message in this book is: don’t believe the key to life is a genetic blueprint. Genes provide the framework for the development of an organism, but much of an organism’s development takes place within cells, in response to their environment, and this is not based only around the transmitted genes. A classic example is a six-fingered human. Such a case is very rare, but it can happen, and yet the organism has no difficulty managing to control all six digits. How could this be in the genetic blueprint, which would expect (at least general readers with only common-sense ideas about genetics) state “five fingers, and no more and no less”.   

Well, Ball’s thesis is very well argued, and very persuasive. Incidentally, he claims he has an advantage over science practitioners who also write: practitioners such as Dawkins or Pinker tend to write from a particular viewpoint: they are trying to present a case. Ball claims in an interview that “my books present opinions and points of view, but I strive also to present some balance”. In this book, Ball is pretty determined to present his view, supported by many references to a small number of researchers he uses to defend his case, including Michael Levin (87 references), Evelyn Fox Keller, and Kevin Mitchell. 

Ball’s argument is that life is a meaning generator, by which he means that cells work by responding to their environment and being responsible for autonomous actions. 

We think of how life works in the wrong way: as a kind of teleological drive to make the end-forms long familiar to zoologists, rather than as a palette of possibilities arising from the exigencies of the cells themselves. [p436]

it’s a very valid idea, but Mr Ball takes his time over it. I am no biologist, and Ball takes no prisoners with his terminology. I had to look up all the terms he gleefully inserts in this so-called popular science title: over 100 of them (104, to be precise). He is somewhat cavalier in not always defining his terms. He assumes a familiarity with genetics and with the major developments of the 20th century. His chapter on synthetic biology is getting off the point. His eighteen-page prologue only really starts to make sense after you have finished the rest of the book.

So who, in fact, is he writing for? For himself, because he is clearly fascinated by the problems of present-day biologists. In his interview, he describes the pleasure of not being a researcher, but as a writer “ I was free to choose what I really wanted to do!” Few of us have that privilege. I think his writing, however gifted, betrays the challenge at the root of science communication, which only becomes apparent right at the end of the book. This is not really a popular science title, although it should be.

Ball’s assumed readership is other researchers; plus, presumably, the mythical general readers of Nature who have a wide general education, specifically, an up-to-date science background, and the willingness to look at things in context, rather than in detail. Do such people exist? I hardly think he has written a book of more than 450 pages of text to convert and persuade the general reader. Such a reader would need reading skills of a high order to get through the book, and a lot of patience, to be able to follow his argument. Too many technical terms: in fact, as my aunt used to say “TMI (too much information!)”

Ball’s big new idea (and again, it is rare indeed for a science writer to have such ideas) is that of “causal emergence”, or “causal spreading” – that human-level cognition emerges not from single genes, but from the interaction of components, typically cells, during the growth of the organism. It’s a mistake, in other words, to search for a gene for intelligence. Fascinatingly, the other thinkers Ball mentions with this kind of vision tend to be philosophers of science, as much as researchers.

But the most revealing part of the book, for me, was right at the end of the book. Why bury the essential background in the acknowledgements at the back? Nowhere else does he explain his justification for writing. Looking at the present state of biology, reports Ball, gives you a headache:

 

once you get into the details—the transcription factors and signaling pathways and differentiation of cells, say—it is hard to make out any pattern or coherence to it all. No question seems to have a simple answer, experiments conflict, and researchers argue among themselves. All the same, I came away from my time at Harvard convinced, first, that an attempt to find some new narratives was imperative, and second, that those narratives do exist. [p462]

Certainly, Ball has provided a new narrative, and has repeatedly warned us about the dangers of narratives and metaphors - any metaphor will only be partial and may confuse us. In fact, his answer is largely to show up the inadequacy of existing metaphors, especially the “genetic blueprint” and the “selfish gene”.

My view is that Ball has achieved heroic results in this book by making leading-edge biology intelligible, and by attempting to challenge the current popular world-view of genetics. And, let’s not deny it, Ball is far more entertaining to read than the detailed but often uncommunicative Wikipedia articles and introductions to biology I had to look up. All credit to Ball for tackling such an important question: what life means, not from a theological point of view, but from a biological point of view, an important distinction. But I couldn’t help feeling the book could have been shorter, and the text less technical, to enable him to get the message across in a more accessible way. He should be writing for us, as much as for himself.