How Life Works – A User’s Guide to the New Biology
Forget what you think you know about biology. Philip Ball is here to take us to the new frontier of the life sciences, and reveal why life is much, much stranger than we realise.
Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works – the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, and more – have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.
Philip Ball joins How To Academy to explore the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. We know now that there is no one place to look for an answer to the question of how life works – life is a system of many levels, each with its own rules and principles. With this knowledge comes new possibilities: from reprogramming cells to regenerating limbs and perhaps even creating new forms of life that evolution never imagined.
Both a brilliant summary of recent developments in biology and a radical manifesto for a post-Dawkins understanding of genetics and evolution, this is an unmissable introduction to a new understanding of life. Online.
Time: 18:30 GMT
