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“Bold and intriguing.”—Wall Street Journal • “Penetrating.... Provocative and profound.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) • “Offers plenty of food for thought.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Ball's marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep.... I could not put it down.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Song of the Cell and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies A new, cutting-edge vision of biology that revises our understanding of what life itself is, how to enhance it, and what possibilities it offers. Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—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—have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong. In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time). With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. As we discover the conditions that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more extraordinary. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined. Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the life sciences, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.

This book is a vision of biology set within the entire timescale of the universe. It is about the timing of life, from microsecond movements to evolutionary changes over millions of years. Human consciousness is riveted to seconds, but a split-second time delay in perception means that we are unaware of anything until it has already happened. We live in the very recent past. Over longer timescales, this book examines the lifespans of the oldest organisms, prospects for human life extension, the evolution of whales and turtles, and the explosive beginning of life four billion years ago. With its poetry, social commentary, and humor, this book will appeal to everyone interested in the natural world.

Notre histoire s'écoule sur 13,8 milliards d'années pendant lesquelles des actions structurantes ont permis d'organiser le désordre pour arriver à nous. C'est ce chemin qui a été divisé en 27 conditions essentielles. Si une seule de ces conditions n'est pas remplie, soit nous mourons, soit nous n'avons jamais existé.

Als James Lovelock 1979 seine Gaia-Hypothese veröffentlichte, war die Reaktion kontrovers: Von Teilen der Öffentlichkeit bewundert, wurde »Gaia« von vielen Wissenschaftlern ins Reich der Esoterik verwiesen. Mittlerweile ist die zentrale Aussage dieses Meilensteins der Ökologiebewegung auch in der Wissenschaft angekommen: Die Erde kann wie ein Lebewesen betrachtet werden, als komplexes System, das durch dynamische Vorgänge innerhalb der Biosphäre stabilisiert wird. Wer wissen will, wie das »Lebewesen Erde« funktioniert, kommt an Lovelocks Buch nicht vorbei. Die Reihe »Bibliothek der Nachhaltigkeit« präsentiert Autorinnen und Autoren, die als Pioniere und Vordenkerinnen ihrer Zeit voraus waren und ungewöhnliche Wege des Denkens eröffnet haben. Ihre Texte liefern auch heute noch wichtige Impulse für die Diskussion und Praxis der Nachhaltigkeit, Transformation und Zukunftsfähigkeit unserer Gesellschaft.

Today, a scientific explanation is not meant to ascribe agency to natural phenomena: we would not say a rock falls because it seeks the center of the earth. Even for living things, in the natural sciences and often in the social sciences, the same is true. A modern botanist would not say that plants pursue sunlight. This has not always been the case, nor, perhaps, was it inevitable. Since the seventeenth century, many thinkers have made agency, in various forms, central to science. The Restless Clock examines the history of this principle, banning agency, in the life sciences. It also tells the story of dissenters embracing the opposite idea: that agency is essential to nature. The story begins with the automata of early modern Europe, as models for the new science of living things, and traces questions of science and agency through Descartes, Leibniz, Lamarck, and Darwin, among many others. Mechanist science, Jessica Riskin shows, had an associated theology: the argument from design, which found evidence for a designer in the mechanisms of nature. Rejecting such appeals to a supernatural God, the dissenters sought to naturalize agency rather than outsourcing it to a “divine engineer.” Their model cast living things not as passive but as active, self-making machines. The conflict between passive- and active-mechanist approaches maintains a subterranean life in current science, shaping debates in fields such as evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This history promises not only to inform such debates, but also our sense of the possibilities for what it means to engage in science—and even what it means to be alive.

Life is a diverse and ubiquitous phenomenon on Earth, characterized by fundamental features distinguishing living bodies from nonliving material. Yet it is also so complex that it has long defied precise definition. This book from a seasoned biologist offers new insights into the nature of life by illuminating a fascinating architecture of dualities inherent in its existence and propagation. Life is connected with individual living beings, yet it is also a collective and inherently global phenomenon of the material world. It embodies a dual existence of cycles of phenotypic life, and their unseen driver — an uninterrupted march of genetic information whose collective immortality is guaranteed by individual mortality. Although evolution propagates and tunes species of organisms, the beings produced can be regarded merely as tools for the survival and cloning of genomes written in an unchanging code. What are the physical versus informational bases and driving forces of life, and how do they unite as an integrated system? What does time mean for individuals, life on the global scale, and the underlying information? This accessible examination of principles and evidence shows that a network of dualities lies at the heart of biological puzzles that have engaged the human mind for millennia.

For millennia, shamans and philosophers, believers and nonbelievers, artists and scientists have tried to make sense of our existence by suggesting that everything is connected, that a mysterious Oneness binds us to everything else. People go to temples, churches, mosques, and synagogues to pray to their divine incarnation of Oneness. Following a surprisingly similar notion, scientists have long asserted that under Nature's apparent complexity there is a simpler underlying reality. In its modern incarnation, this Theory of Everything would unite the physical laws governing very large bodies (Einstein's theory of relativity) and those governing tiny ones (quantum mechanics) into a single framework. But despite the brave efforts of many powerful minds, the Theory of Everything remains elusive. It turns out that the universe is not elegant. It is gloriously messy. Overturning more than twenty-five centuries of scientific thought, award-winning physicist Marcelo Gleiser argues that this quest for a Theory of Everything is fundamentally misguided, and he explains the volcanic implications this ideological shift has for humankind. All the evidence points to a scenario in which everything emerges from fundamental imperfections, primordial asymmetries in matter and time, cataclysmic accidents in Earth's early life, and duplication errors in the genetic code. Imbalance spurs creation. Without asymmetries and imperfections, the universe would be filled with nothing but smooth radiation. A Tear at the Edge of Creation calls for nothing less than a new'humancentrism'to reflect our position in the universal order. All life, but intelligent life in particular, is a rare and precious accident. Our presence here has no meaning outside of itself, but it does have meaning. The unplanned complexity of humankind is all the more beautiful for its improbability. It's time for science to let go of the old aesthetic that labels perfection beautiful and holds that'beauty is truth.'It's time to look at the evidence without centuries of monotheistic baggage. In this lucid, down-to-earth narrative, Gleiser walks us through the basic and cutting-edge science that fueled his own transformation from unifier to doubter—a fascinating scientific quest that led him to a new understanding of what it is to be human.

A discussion of life cycles and individual size in organisms, and of the relationships between the two, and of their conjoint role in evolution.Originally published in 1965.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In Diatoms to Dinosaurs, Chris McGowan takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the natural world, and examines life in all its various forms. He imparts the excitement of discovery and the joy of understanding as he demonstrates the central importance of size and scale to the survival of living organisms. McGowan investigates a wide range of size-related phenomena, from the gliding mechanism of diatoms to blood pressure problems of dinosaurs. Questions asked -- and answered -- include: Will we ever see giant insects the size of pterodactyls? Why are ants so much stronger relative to body size than elephants? What do a clam, a condor, a tortoise, and a sturgeon have in common? How did the skeleton of a 28-ton Apatosaurus support its weight? How can blood get from the heart to the head of a giraffe without rupturing blood vessels? The author explicates the scientific concepts -- both physical and biological -- needed to inform the relevant phenomena: area/volume relations, metabolism and other basic physiology, kinetic energy, inertial forces, the biology of senescence, boundary layers, and Reynolds numbers. Numerous illustrations scattered throughout the text make the biophysical principles easily comprehensible to readers, regardless of their scientific sophistication.