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Here are some notable quotes from Philip Ball's How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology, organized by theme:(mitpressbookstore)
🧬 On the Nature of Life
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“The growth and maintenance of living things like us is a delicate (but also robust) dance of cause and effect, cascading up and down the hierarchy of scales in space and time. This leads to that, but then that creates a new this. It’s for this reason that life can only be understood as a dynamic process of becoming—from conception to the grave.” (Goodreads)
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“I don’t anticipate a consensus any time soon on the question of how to define life, but it seems to me that cognition provides a much better, more apt way to talk about it than invoking more passive capabilities such as metabolism and replication. Those latter two attributes might be necessary, but they are means to an end: they’re not really what life is about.” (Goodreads)
🧪 On Complexity and Emergence
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“Life is a result of the complex and interconnected processes of evolution, self-organization, and emergence.” (Bookey)
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“Life is shaped by chance events, constraints, and environmental influences, leading to the diversity and adaptability we observe.” (Bookey)
🧠 On Genes and Systems
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“The old view of genes as distinct segments of DNA strung along the chromosomes like beads, interspersed with junk, and each controlling some aspect of phenotype, was basically a kind of genetic phrenology.” (Surfing Complexity)
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“Our genetic code is a toolbox, not a blueprint.” (Surfing Complexity)
🔬 On Scientific Inquiry
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“Every discovery in science opens up new possibilities for the future.” (Bookey)
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“Science should be a conversation, not a monologue.” (Bookey)
If you're interested in a deeper exploration of these themes or specific chapters, feel free to ask!
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