How Life Works

What Hacker News says

1. o_nateMay 2026
   I'm currently reading (and enjoying) "How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology" by Philip Ball. It proceeds from the bottom up: the first half is all about cells and smaller structures. Pretty readable but doesn't gloss over complexity.
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2. marstallMay 2026
   Philip Ball helped me understand this in his book "How Life Works." He makes the point that you can't understand language by understanding letters. Walking up to someone and just saying "L" won't have any effect. And given just an understanding of the alphabet, you would never be able to use that on its own to understand a whole book, you have to move up. The whole has its own kind of existence. I think about how hard it is for one individual to influence a culture. You kind of have to speak and operate at the highest level to change things. I know that's super vague but those are just the terms I've been thinking about it in.
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3. KineticLensmanNov 2024
   > I'd think that a self replicating life form will need something to carry it's program,

   Well yes, for sure, a replicator needs some sort of 'program', and if you go for carbon+water, amino acids are a good bet.

   > and this is what DNA is

   Yes, on Earth. But the actual horrendously weird and complex molecule Deoxyribonucleic acid is not the only way of implementing such a program. Check out a text such as 'How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology', by Philip Ball to see why I'm being picky here.

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4. samuellAug 2024
   I find the analogy itself super interesting and thought-provoking, and might be quite useful in studying biological systems.

   The idea that we need to move away from understanding the genetic code as static machinery also aligns well with recent understanding of biology, as summarized in the highly appraised book "How Life Works" by Philip Ball [1]

   But in terms of evolution, I don't see how the proposed analogy/model will get away with the fact that natural selection operates on the individual level (either you survive or you don't), while all genomic information is a package of (depending on the organism) humongous number of genes, not to mention base pairs or individual locuses (that's not even mentioning diploidy, that will mean two different copies of each locus).

   With the known proportions and numbers of positive vs slightly deleterious mutations (much more of the latter, counted in the hundreds per individual), selection of positive mutations can not avoid accumulating slightly deleterious mutations.

   I don't get how the proposed model is supposed to solve that.

   I see that a smartly designed system could probably have processes that can change multiple loci in parallel in a beneficial way (along the lines of the theory of facilitated variation by Gerhart & Kirschner. See their papers or [2]), but that would only explain how such a fine-tuned system could be effective at adaptation, not how the system itself - including its processes - could arise from a state before these processes are in place.

   To connect it to ML: In natural selection you don't have gradients and the ability to update multiple parameters based on detailed feedback on them individually. You only can provide a whole, binary feedback (survive, 1, or not, 0), to the whole set of parameters, whether they are slightly deleterious or possibly positive. The resolution is simply lacking here.

   - [1] https://www.amazon.com/How-Life-Works-Users-Biology/dp/02268...

   - [2] https://www.amazon.com/Plausibility-Life-Resolving-Darwins-D...

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5. sohkamyungFeb 2024
   I just recently read "How Life Works" by Philip Ball that covers that topic (and more). An information dense book, but entertaining. [1]

   [1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo207403...

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6. igouyMar 2025
   Over the past few weeks, I've been reading "How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology" by Philip Ball, and I was frequently reminded of Alan Kay's interest in biological systems.

   https://how-life-works.philipball.co.uk/

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