How Life Works

Prologue

• Looking to the genome for an account of ho life works is rather like looking to a dictionary to understand how literature works.
• The new picture dispels the long-standing idea that living systems must be regarded as machines.
• Living entities are generators of meaning. They mine their environment (including their own bodies) for things that have meaning for them: moisture, nutrients, warmth. It is not sentimental but simply following the same logic to say that, for we human organisms, another of those meaningful things is love.
• Life is a hierarchical process, and each level has its own rules and principles: there are those that apply to genes, and to proteins, to cells and tissues and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system. All are essential: none can claim primacy.
• Genes don't generally specify unique outcomes at the level of cells and organisms.
• Recurring themes and principles:
  • Complexity and Redundancy
  • Modularity
  • Robustness
  • Canalization
  • Multilevel, Multidirectional, and Hierarchical Organization
  • Combinatorial Logic
  • Self-Organization in Dynamic Landscapes
  • Agency and Purpose
  • Causal Power

1. The End of the Machine: A New View of Life

• Living things are, you could say, those entities capable of attributing value in their environment, and thereby finding a point to the universe.
• Meaning-generators are successful entities in a Darwinian world. Making meaning is a great way of staying alive and propagating - so much so, indeed, that it's probably the only way to be alive at all.
• The point is that we need to acknowledge what evolution does to matter: it gives matter goals and functions. That is what makes evolved life so special.