In How Life Works, science writer Philip Ball takes us on a fascinating jour-ney through a relatively quiet revolution occurring in the biological sciences. According to Ball, the old reductionist gene-centered view of life that has dominated since the middle of the twentieth century is now defunct, even if it is still perpetuated in many quarters. Rather, modern biology is quickly revealing a more dynamic view of living organisms whereas causal agency works at all levels of organismal complexity, not just at the genetic level. No longer can we think of the genome as a blueprint for an organism. The instructions embedded in the genome are subject to interpretation and regulation by a myriad of cellular and organismal systems in ways that defy predictions about the phenotype of an organism simply by analyzing its genotype. Genetic essentialism is a thing of the past.
Through a series of eleven chapters, Ball takes readers on a ride up the scale of organismal complexity from DNA to RNA to proteins to networks to cells to tissues to bodies and finally to agency. He also touches on the implications of this more dynamic view of life for medicine and genetic engineering. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book, at least for me, is the way that Ball is repeatedly forced by the scientific evidence to appeal to design language. To be sure, Ball is no advocate of intelligent design. Toward the end of the book, he explicitly states, “I do want to be clear…that there is no obvious challenge in any of what I have said or say hereafter to the core principles of Darwinism—or perhaps we should say of neo-Darwinism” (453). And about the appearance of agency in evolution he states, “There need be nothing mystical about the question—it is not a backdoor for intelligent de-sign” (460). Ball wants to assure his readers that he remains a member in good standing of the biological establishment and adheres to the tenants of methodological naturalism. But his need to emphasize this only serves to demonstrate his awareness of how what he says about the workings of life could easily be seen to justify intelligent design thinking. I will focus this review around several of these issues.
To begin with, Ball emphasizes the intractable problem lying at the heart of origin of life research—the fact that DNA can do nothing without being contained in a cell, but a cell cannot form without DNA instructions. Ball writes:
The fact that DNA can only be made with the help of proteins (such as DNA polymerase), and that proteins can only be made with the help of DNA, poses a chicken-and-egg conundrum for how the whole shebang could have got started when life on Earth began (109).
This precise chicken-and-egg conundrum is often cited by advocates of intelligent design as evidence against a purely naturalistic origin of life. But while recognizing the problem, Ball simply side-steps its significance for a naturalistic origin of life. He certainly believes in the latter but can provide no evidence for it since the origin of life remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science.
Later, Ball takes on the issue of “Junk DNA.” One of the startling findings of the Human Genome Project was that only 2-3% of human DNA codes for amino acid synthesis. The balance of the genome was then termed junk DNA, DNA sequences that accumulated through evolutionary history but that no longer have function. But as Ball recognizes, the ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) project has shown that non-coding regions of the genome play important regulatory roles and it may be that most or all of the human genome is functional. This has not sat well with many biologists because it seems to imply purposeful design of the genome. Ball cites evolutionary bi-ologist Ford Doolittle to the effect that if most of the human genome was not junk, we would have to be unique among animals. Doolittle called this “genetic anthropocentrism” (123). But this is exactly what ENCODE has demonstrated, a prediction made by the way originally by advocates of intelligent design. Ball can’t escape the evidence but understands its controversial nature by stating in regard to criticisms of ENCODE, “To accuse an internationally renowned team of scientists of opening the door to intelligent design is akin to an ideological accusation of a betrayal of the faith” (123). Ball is perfectly comfortable with the idea of purpose in biology, even as he tries to assure his readers that he has not gone over to the dark side of intelligent design. But his language betrays him at every turn.
Take for example his discussion of intrinsically disordered proteins. While it used to be thought that all proteins fold into stable three-dimensional shapes based on their amino acid sequences, recent research has discovered a class of proteins that remain in a mostly unfolded state until they are needed to perform a function at which time they fold into an appropriate shape to per-form that function. According to Ball (citing cancer researcher Ewa Gryzbowska), intrinsically disordered proteins “enable cells to respond quickly to a change in circumstances, giving access to a wide variety of possible routes for transmitting and directing signals that are—and this is crucial!—not pre-programmed into the system” (164). But Ball, unfortunately, ignores the crucial question: how do cells know how to respond in unprogrammed ways to unexpected circumstances? Is he hinting at the idea of cellular or even molecular cognition like what was implied in the work of the Nobel Prize winning geneticist Barbara McClintock in the 1980s? Ball again lets this question slide, but his use of design language and implications of intelligent agency in biology continues.
In a discussion of causal emergence (the idea that new characteristics of a system emerge at higher levels of complexity), Ball calls this phenomenon a “general design principle for life” (217). And again, in a discussion of body-patterning processes during embryonic development, Ball writes:
Here again we can see one of nature’s design principles: to find the right balance between top-down, bottom-up, and middle-out mechanisms for building organisms, so that adaptation and variation can happen, and innovations—dramatic new solutions to the challenge of “design”—are possible without producing a dangerous sensitivity to small changes (330).
Why Ball puts scare quotes around design in one place but not the other is unclear. But he clearly sees some kind of design at work in the structure of organisms and the processes that bring that structure about.
Once again, on page 361, we find Ball introducing design language:
Indeed, even single, functional biomolecules like proteins represent their environment in a sense, for example in the way that the polypeptide chains are “designed” to fold on the assumption that they will do so in water, and the way enzymes have active cites that in a sense “anticipate” their respective target ligands.
Here Ball protects himself with the use of scare quotes, but they aren’t really very helpful. If polypeptide chains are designed to do a certain thing, then they are designed which implies a designer. If they aren’t designed, then their behavior must be the result of undirected natural processes. Ball would seem to want to have it both ways. He wants to maintain fidelity to the accumulating evidence for design but does not want to lose credibility with his design-averse scientific readers.
To his credit, Ball sees the problem. But his solution only makes matters worse. He writes:
I have talked here about cells deciding their fate: electing which valley of the landscape to go down. This sounds like very anthropomorphic language, but it needn’t be. After all, we speak routinely of computer systems making decisions too, especially in artificial intelligence (262).
Yes, computer systems make decisions. But only because they have been de-signed that way by intelligent computer scientists. No one has ever seen a decision-making computer system arise by an undirected physical process. Computer systems are intelligently designed. By employing this analogy, Ball has undermined his own anti-intelligent design stance. If the existence of computer cognition implies an intelligent origin for computers, why wouldn’t the existence of cellular cognition likewise imply an intelligent origin for cells? Ball ignores this question.
On the very next page, however, he doubles down by quoting biologist Den-nis Bray:
…living cells have an intrinsic sensitivity to their environment—a reflexivity, a capacity to detect and record salient features of their surroundings—that is essential for their survival. This feature is deeply woven into the molecular fabric of living cells (263).
Furthermore, Ball does not exclude the possibility that cells are sentient. Throughout this fascinating book about how life works, Ball is consistently driven by the accumulating biological evidence toward the idea of cellular cognition. But he stops short of ever asking whether cellular cognition could arise through a non-cognitive, physical process. As he brings this revolutionary new view of life to light, one can often sense Ball’s own sense of embarrassment at the larger implications of what he is saying. But to his credit, he maintains fidelity to the scientific evidence and bears the resulting embarrassment rather than downplaying the truly marvellous world of the cell as it continues to emerge through modern research.
How Life Works is a fascinating book and Ball is a gifted science writer rendering the book a real pleasure to read. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this all-to-quiet biological revolution. But I have a feeling that much to Ball’s dismay, it may be advocates of intelligent design who become most excited about the book. For the revolution in biology that Ball so proficiently maps out continues to chip away at any notion that biology can be reduced entirely to chemistry and physics. There is a lot more going on.
Robert F. Shedinger
Luther College
Reprinted from Reviews in Science, Religion and Theology, 3(2) June 2024, pp. 39-42
