How Life Works cover art

How Life Works

A User’s Guide to the New Biology

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About this listen

Enticingly read by the author, Philip Ball.

'An essential primer on humanity’s ongoing quest to understand the secrets of life . . . Excellent . . . Ball is a terrific writer.' – Adam Rutherford, The Guardian

A cutting-edge new vision of biology that proposes to revise our concept of what life is – from Science Book Prize winner Philip Ball.

Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works 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. 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. 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 nature of life, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.

 Biological Sciences Biology Evolution Evolution & Genetics Genetics Science Natural History

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Critic reviews

Ball is a terrific writer . . . An essential primer in our never-ending quest to understand life (Adam Rutherford, The Guardian)
Ball is a ferociously gifted science writer . . . There is so much [here] that is amazing . . . urgent . . . astonishing
Ambitious and eye-opening
The best biology book I've ever read (Brian Clegg, Popular Science)
A mind-stretching book . . . Ball is a clarifier supreme. It is hard to imagine a more concise, coherent, if also challenging, single volume written on the discoveries made in the life sciences over the past 70 years
Full of fascinating information . . . The dedicated reader will come away with many novel insights and a new perspective on what makes life special
Lucid . . . suggests that before they can understand what really comprises life, biologists have first to unlearn a great deal of what they think they know
Well researched, interesting, and stimulating
Ball deftly explains how it’s possible to follow, in exquisite detail, how cells develop and specialise to form an organism. We are revising life constantly, and Ball’s account of synthetic biology takes us to this exciting frontier
A must-read user's guide for biologists and non-biologists alike . . . It's time to stop pretending that, give or take a few bits and pieces, we know how life works. Instead, we must let our ideas evolve as more discoveries are made in the coming decades (Denis Noble, Nature)
Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep . . . How Life Works has exciting implications for the future of the science of biology itself. I could not put it down (Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction)
Ball has the rare ability to explain scientific concepts across very diverse disciplines. . . . He explains the turn away from a purely mechanical view of life to one that embraces the inherently dynamic, complex, multilayered, interactive, and cognitive nature of the processes by which life sustains and regenerates itself (James Shapiro, author of Evolution)
Offers a much-needed examination of exciting, cutting-edge findings in contemporary biology that is likely to dramatically transform our understanding of living systems (Daniel J. Nicholson, coeditor of Everything Flows)
Ball takes glee in tearing down scientific shibboleths . . . and his penetrating analysis underscores the stakes of outdated assumptions. . . . Provocative and profound, this has the power to change how readers understand life’s most basic mechanisms
In showing that complex life is more 'emergent' than 'programmed,' Ball takes on many conventional notions about biology . . . Offers plenty of food for thought for scientists in disciplines from medicine to engineering (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)
This book is amazing. I listened to it twice and still probably only understood half of it, but felt excited to keep dipping back in in future to see what more I can learn. It’s a companion for life (pun intended)

Profound!

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This has to be my favourite book this year; very easy to listen to, and so informative. unfortunately at my age my memory is not so great, so will have to start it again to try to recall all that information. loved it.

A brilliant overview of our cells

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Fascinating eye opener on how living systems really work and how the obsession with genes alone have lead us up the grden path

Eye opening perspective on how living systems really work

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Shows insufficiency of genetic theories to explain evolution. Shows examples and directions from which better theories could emerge from. However, ignores new ideas from process theory that could have provided a framework for bringing these examples together. Read Juarrero for the most compelling of these ideas.

Great territory mapping of current evolutionary ideas

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It’s a very detailed in terms of cellular biology which I like and just shows how much the current hypothesis is just that . A best guess .
The PDF only downloads first page as this is continually referred to it’s frustrating.

PDF only downloads front page ?

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I was really excited to listen to this audiobook, as I am an A level Biology teacher of over 30 years experience working in a highly academic independent school wanting to find a book which is bang up to date with the latest thinking in the world of biology that could get my students excited and enthused. Instead, I found most of this dry, impenetrable with so few engaging and fascinating examples which makes biology come alive (pun intended!) that there is no way I could recommend this book to others. I know there is s lot of ideas of Dawkins which are refuted in this book but, in my opinion, Phillip Ball could learn a huge amount from him about engaging and exciting an audience and making them want to truly understand the content.

Disappointing

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