The world's most beautiful language?

All man talk sweet sweet but one talk sweet pass and make you no fit think

From the world’s loveliest language

A fun article from The Economist. (It’s one of those mags I like to quote from where you can read a few articles a month without a paying subscription).

Linguists tend to say that all languages are valuable, expressive and complex. They usually attribute negative attitudes to prejudice and politics. That is probably why no one has carefully studied the touchy question of which ones are seen as beautiful or ugly.

That is until three scholars—Andrey Anikin, Nikolay Aseyev and Niklas Erben Johansson—published their study of 228 languages last year*. They hit upon the idea of using an online film about the life of Jesus, which its promoters have recorded in hundreds of languages. Crucially, most recordings had at least five different speakers, as the film has both exposition and dialogue. The team recruited 820 people from three different language groups—Chinese, English and Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew and Maltese speakers)—to listen to clips and rate the languages’ attractiveness.

What they found was that nearly all the 228 languages were rated strikingly similarly …. The highest-rated? Despite the supposed allure (at least among Anglophones) of French and Italian, it was Tok Pisin, an English creole spoken in Papua New Guinea [This is a recursive name — and means ‘talk pidgin’. NG]. The lowest? Chechen. The three language groups broadly coincided in their preferences. But the differences between the best and worst-rated languages were so slight—and the variation among individual raters so great—that no one should be tempted to crown Tok Pisin the world’s prettiest language with any authority. …

Negative results in experiments usually do not make waves, but this one is both interesting—since it goes so strongly against people’s instincts—and cheering. The world is divided enough. As the researchers conclude, “We have emphasised the fundamental phonetic and aesthetic unity of world languages.”

Oh — and I cheated with the heading. I asked Bing to translate "the world's loveliest language will blow you away" into Tok Pisin. But it was such a jumble of English, German, Malay and local dialects that it was incomprehensible. “Tok bilong olgeta manmeri i gat bikpela switnes na em bai mekim yu no inap tingting”. So I asked for the same in an English based pidgin.

Rory Stewart again

I continue to enjoy Rory Stewart’s retrospectacles — his looking back on his time in politics. He’s one of the very few ex-politicians I know who speaks to my own sense of the utter corruption of modern politics. As he makes clear, by “corruption”, he doesn’t mean the taking of bribes. He calls it a lack of seriousness. My only way of understanding how it’s come to this is that people in systems respond to incentives and we are beginning to learn how tangential is the relation between stewardship of the public interest and electoral success at least in our hyped up, bullshit drenched world in which politics has become a small subsidiary of the media business and the plaything of the power hungry. If your accountability is delivered through social and mass media coverage, there’s vanishingly little reason to craft good policy — and of course some reasons not to (like the way the powerful might mobilise against you.)

Rory is also proposing a third chamber of parliament selected by lot. I can’t think where he got the idea from, but it’s much better than replacing the second chamber with such a body for two reasons.

1. Upper houses both here and in many places elsewhere (like the UK) often do a better job of it than lower houses and their performance as review houses could be developed further.

2. New ideas and initiatives have a hard enough time of it in our veto riddled politics that coupling them with other, chancy initiatives (like upper house reform) more or less dooms them. That having been said, since House of Lords reform is on the agenda (yet again!) the Sortition Foundation is campaigning to replace the House of Lords with a body selected by lot. I doubt it will happen but it’s a good way to continue raising the profile of representation by sampling.

Against degrowth

I perked up at this FT column from Tim Harford “The planet’s got 99 problems, but exponential growth isn’t one”. The way I like to tell the story is to say that we’ve heard it all about Sydney’s beaches. In the 19th century with Sydney a few hundred thousand souls strong, the beaches were getting polluted. That showed we’d reached Sydney’s peak sustainable population right? Well no. We could pump it further out to sea. The various e. coli disasters of the 1970s showed that the peak was closer to a few million. Anyway, then we actually started treating the sewerage and it turned out Sydney could hold even more people. Ditto economic growth. We need to decarbonise, and clean up production. Beyond that we’re good. Degrowthing seems most likely to set off zero sum thinking with beggar thy neighbour rather than ‘win-win’ outcomes, especially in our rapidly toxifying form of democracy through electoral competition. So carbon taxes, aggressive action against pollution are good. Degrowthing? It’s a no from me.

An old illustration of exponential growth remains the best. Legend has it that the genius who invented chess was asked to name his reward by a delighted monarch, and requested a modest-sounding payment: one grain of rice for the first square of the chessboard, two for the second, four for the third . . . doubling each time.

This doubling is an exponential process, and most people are surprised when they first hear that the 64th square would require more than any harvest could produce.

Less intuitive yet, each square contains more rice than all the previous squares put together. Whatever square you pick, and no matter how dramatic the pile of rice might seem, what comes next will make it all seem trivial. Now substitute energy consumption or carbon emissions for rice, and you can see the environmental catastrophe looming. …

A glance at the UK, one of the world’s first developed economies, is instructive. This industrialising heart of empire once burnt vast quantities of atmosphere-warming, lung-shrivelling coal. But as Hannah Ritchie notes in her thoughtful new book Not the End of the World, per capita coal emissions in the UK peaked more than 100 years ago. Some of that fall represents the offshoring of industrial processes, with the coal choking someone else, but most of it reflects the use of cleaner, more efficient technology.

In the UK, CO₂ emissions per person have halved during my lifetime. Globally, CO₂ emissions per person peaked in 2012. Although the world still faces huge environmental challenges, there is nothing about these numbers that suggests exponential growth. Economic growth does continue — maybe not exponentially, but it’s exponential-ish. Fortunately, the planet simply does not care about numbers in the national income accounts. What matters for our environment are flows of energy, pollutants and other physical quantities. …

[Ed Conway, in his book Material World] worries that we take for granted the hidden industrial processes underpinning our everyday comforts. Ritchie is concerned that we are so disheartened by prophecies of doom that we may miss the chance to become the first truly sustainable generation in the modern world. Both are right. We depend on a huge variety of natural resources; there are both alarming and encouraging trends. We need the right policies now, and to embrace them means setting aside thought experiments about exponential growth, and looking instead at what the data shows us about the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Veering right to fend off … the right!

An interesting news article on Macron’s ‘pivot’. HT:CLK.

Emmanuel Macron burst on to the European scene in 2017 as the innovative politician who stopped the populist wave then sweeping Britain, America, Italy and central Europe. Last week, in an implicit admission of his failure, he unveiled a plan to salvage his second term and avoid his worst nightmare: handing over the keys to the Elysée palace in 2027 to Marine Le Pen, the far right leader he defeated twice. …

Still demonised five years ago, [Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN)] now claims the mainstream mantle, thanks to the shrewd management of its 88 members in the National Assembly. … With polls that show a 10-point lead for the RN — with almost 30 per cent of voters saying they intend to vote for the party — over his own party, Renaissance, ahead of the European parliament elections in June, Macron wants to give a new direction to his presidency. That, clearly, is a turn to the right, as his controversial immigration bill showed — it finally passed in December, after almost splitting his troops. Gone is the mantra of the French president’s first term, the en même temps which allowed him to borrow from both the left and the right. French citizens, he now thinks, want order and authority. This is precisely what made his new prime minister popular during his short stint as education minister — 34-year-old Gabriel Attal started with banning the abaya, the Muslim robe, from public schools.

Macron is taking things a step further. In a two-and-a-half hour, almost-monarchical, press conference on prime time television, he explained how France should take back control of its youth. “Civic rearmament”, as he described it, will make a fractured society strong again and schools will be the new barracks of this strategy. Call it the weaponisation of education: “La Marseillaise” will be taught in primary school, civic education lessons will be doubled, school uniforms will be tested and, if successful, rolled out across the education system in 2026. Graduation ceremonies will be reinstated to restore merit and pride. The president suggests regulating the amount of time children spend in front of screens; drama classes could be offered instead. Also, at a time of demographic decline, Macron has a plan to fill up these schools with new soldiers. A fight against infertility will be launched and a better-paid six-month “newborn leave” for both parents will replace the current system. …

This is the first big battle in the campaign for the European elections. Macron cannot afford to lose them if he wants to avoid the fate of Barack Obama — succession by a Trump equivalent — and to save his still ambitious European agenda. Wary of the risk of becom- ing a lame duck president, he keeps running, confusing his centre-left supporters who have nowhere to go while trying to ignore a fundamental contradiction: designating the far right as the enemy while legitimising some of its dreams.

Up, down, left right: Neoliberalism and its discontents

Great interview with Brad Delong who, like me would have described himself as a left leaning neoliberal until the project metastasised around the money of the wealthy and the slogans of economists which went from talking about the various costs and benefits of policy options to making broad and sweeping presumptions that markets were to be preferred to governments — which makes about as much sense as saying that needles should be preferred to thread.

J. Bradford DeLong: I try to draw distinctions between right neoliberalism and left neoliberalism, and Global North neoliberalism and Global South neoliberalism. Global South neoliberalism came from a recognition that state capacity was extremely limited, and so betting on globalization and integration—on the market rather than on the state—was the best way forward for humanity. 

Global North neoliberalism is a different beast. It was the belief that social democracy had greatly overreached and had created a society in 1979 that was too bureaucratic, too rigid, and also too equal: the rich needed to be richer so they would be incentivized to create jobs, and the poor needed to be poorer so they would be incentivized to work. 

Within the Global North, right neoliberals thought that any extra inequality was a just arrangement—that the poor really ought to be poor because they were shirkers. As Mitt Romney said, “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” Left neoliberals thought that extra inequality was something to be greatly deplored and perhaps ameliorated. 

So we have three tribes of neoliberals, all of whom think somewhat different things. As time passes, neoliberalism as a current bent toward the right-wing neoliberal. “The market giveth, the market taketh away. Blessed be the name of the market” thought reigned, because maintaining more complicated, nuanced ideas is hard—and because there is a lot of money, both in the Global North and Global South, which benefits from propagating the right neoliberal side. …

Shenk: That critique—of not just the social democratic project, but also the regulatory apparatus that emerged by the 1970s—give us a sense of what you were against. But in 1999 you also called neoliberalism the only live utopian program in the world today. It wasn’t just a critique. There was a positive vision there too. 

DeLong: Neoliberalism produced enormous wealth in the Global South. Deng Xiaoping decided that the Stalinist economics he was taught in the 1920s and 1930s did not work. He returned to an older Chinese tradition of wealth management and borrowed the entrepreneurial classes of Hong Kong and then Taiwan. It worked magnificently. Rajiv Gandhi, starting in 1985, dismantled the Licence Raj. That was also working extraordinarily well. And in the United States we had balanced the fiscal budget. Clinton’s sacrifice of his programmatic goals on the altar of fiscal responsibility appeared to have been a big success. We had rapidly rising real wages from 1994 to 1999 in the United States. That opened the fiscal dividend to start shifting back toward expanding public programs, and it might well have happened if Al Gore had not lost the 2000 presidential election five to four.

Shenk: You saw some of this firsthand working in Clinton’s Treasury Department. Looking back on the period, what mistakes do you think the Clinton team made?

DeLong: Clinton’s focus in 1993 on fiscal responsibility rather than prioritizing social investment was a huge mistake. Restoring America’s government to a sound fiscal basis is not worth doing if the long-run effect is to sacrifice those priorities so that George W. Bush can do another round of tax cuts. Obama sacrificed those priorities again in the desperate pursuit of a grand bargain only for Trump, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell to do another round of tax cuts, with Republican economists lying about how they would boost America’s capital stock by 40 percent. It was a major mistake to think there was a good government caucus on the Republican side that would be able to block the undoing of our work. 

What Clintonism turned out to be was not how Clinton started out. “Ending welfare as we know it” was accompanied by an enormous expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit. And it did not actually diminish the funding that had gone into the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, it just transferred responsibility for program design to the states. For two-thirds of the country, welfare reform was not a very big deal at all; blue state welfare systems continued as they had. In the red states, welfare reform was a long-run disaster. Clinton would say this disaster was partially offset by the fact that if you did get a job, you got a tax credit. Meanwhile, the public infrastructure investment part of the Clinton agenda was nuked by the so-called “centrist” Democratic senators. 

To some degree, Clinton convinced himself that he is extremely happy and proud of everything that happened, but that’s not what the Clinton of 1993 would have thought or said.

Eric Schmidt on Ukraine

The depressing story of our gradually losing interest in defending Europe.

Kyiv has lost its advantages in the drone war. Russian forces have copied many of the tactics that Ukraine pioneered over the summer, including waging large coordinated attacks that use multiple types of drones. First, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance drones hover high above the ground to survey the battlefield and identify targets from afar. They then relay the enemy’s location to pilots operating low-flying, highly maneuverable FPV drones, which can launch precision strikes against both stationary and moving targets, all from a safe distance from the frontline. After these drones eliminate initial targets, military vehicles fight through minefields to begin the ground assault. Since late 2022, Russia has used a combination of two domestically produced drones, the Orlan-10 (a surveillance drone) and the Lancet (an attack drone), to destroy everything from high-value artillery systems to combat jets and tanks. Ukraine surpassed Russia in drone attacks early in the conflict, but it has no combination of drones that match Russia’s dangerous new duo.

At the same time that the Orlan-Lancet team has become decisive in battle, Russia’s superior electronic warfare capabilities allow it to jam and spoof the signals between Ukrainian drones and their pilots. If Ukraine is to neutralize Russian drones, its forces will need the same capabilities. A limited number of Ukrainian brigades have acquired jamming equipment from U.S. suppliers or domestic startups. Without it, the combination of Russian attack drones and Russian jamming of Ukrainian drones threatens to push Ukrainian forces back into the territory that they fought so hard to free early in the war.

Most Western-supplied weapons have fared poorly against Russia’s antiaircraft systems and electronic attacks. When missiles and attack drones are aimed at Russian sites, they are often spoofed or shot down. U.S. weapons in particular can often be thwarted via GPS jamming. A small number of U.S. F-16 fighter jets are set to arrive in Ukraine later this year, and they should quickly get to work targeting Russia’s own jets, which are currently devastating Ukrainian defenses with guided bombs. But it is not clear how even the F-16s will perform amid active electronic warfare and against the long-range missiles deployed by Russian aircraft. …

Russia has doubled the number of tanks built annually before the invasion, from 100 to 200. Russian companies are also manufacturing munitions far more cheaply than their Western counterparts, often compromising on safety to do so: a 152-millimeter artillery shell costs around $600 to produce in Russia, whereas a 155-millimeter shell costs up to ten times that much to produce in the West. This economic disadvantage will be difficult for Ukraine’s allies to overcome. …

In this phase of the war, as the frontlines stabilize, the sky above will fill with ever-greater numbers of drones. Ukraine aims to acquire more than two million drones in 2024—half of which it plans to produce domestically—and Russia is on track to at least match that procurement. With so many aircraft deployed, any troops or equipment moving on the ground will become easy targets. Both armies will therefore focus more on eliminating each other’s weapons and engaging in drone-to-drone dogfights. As technological advances increase the range of drones, their operators and other support systems will be able to stay hundreds of miles from the battle.

Frantz Fanon and decolonialisation

I ran an essay on Frantz Fanon last week and what should turn up, but another essay on him which seemed thoughtful to me, though I haven’t read Fanon?

Fifty years ago, Portugal withdrew from its African colonies after a protracted war. With this retreat, European colonialism came full circle: The Iberian seafaring power, which had kickstarted imperial expansion with the conquest of Ceuta in 1415, had now surrendered the last remaining European colonies in Africa. Leaving aside a few odd exceptions—such as Macau, which remained under Portuguese control until 1999—decolonization was a fait accompli by the mid-1970s. Nonetheless, talk of “decolonization” and demands to “decolonize” this and that have never ceased—and indeed, have grown ever more ubiquitous. According to Google Ngram, the use of the word “decolonization” in books exploded in the final decade of the 20th century and has continued to proliferate in the new millennium. The further we get from the raw facts of actual colonialism, the more the concept’s metaphorical potential seems to expand. …

In the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, aphorisms by Fanon—such as “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon”—circulated widely on social media, and debates over decolonization, settler-colonialism, and related concepts spilled from the seminar room into the streets. But this renewed relevance doesn’t only derive from the fact that the Jewish state is often derided by activists as a vestige of Western colonialism, or that the Palestinian cause is a remnant of the international liberation movement Fanon championed. Just as important is the broader context in which the Hamas onslaught occurred: the first coordinated challenge to the Western-led order since the end of the Cold War, by a constellation of powers arrayed around Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran.

In his time, Fanon was a leading theoretician of the radical strain of “Third-Worldism” that emerged out of national-liberation struggles like Algeria’s and eventually came to encompass insurgencies against Western-backed local elites across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Ernesto “Che” Guevara captured the spirit in 1967 when he called for “two, three, many Vietnams.” Today, a comparable “Global-Southism” is on the rise, but thus far has nowhere near as coherent an ideological vision as its predecessor. The revolutionaries of Fanon’s and Che’s generation spoke a common language of “national liberation” from Rhodesia to Laos to El Salvador. Today’s Global-South coalition, in contrast, is an ideological hodgepodge: socialism with Chinese characteristics, Juche, and pan-Slavic Eurasianism join hands, however tenuously, with both Sunni and Shiite Islamism. …

Shatz [argues that], Fanon always “remained faithful to the ideals of the French Revolution” but hoped “they might be achieved elsewhere, in the independent nations of what was then known as the Third World.” In line with this vision, he attempted to live out a new ideal of cosmopolitan citizenship in which a non-Muslim, non-Arab man of black African descent from the Caribbean could legitimately call himself an Algerian. As the deeper continuity of Fanon’s ideals suggests, the strain of Third-Worldism he exemplified may have positioned itself against Western power, but it was also in many ways an attempt to realize political projects originally conceived in Europe. …

Having initially hesitated to endorse the FLN’s terroristic methods, the middle-aged Sartre and his lifelong partner, Simone de Beauvoir, seem to have been radicalized by Fanon and other anti-colonial agitators, which placed them at odds with the other great philosopher of existentialism, the Algerian-born Albert Camus. The rift between Camus and Sartre cut across the French intellectual left, splitting those who opposed colonialism but rejected the violent tactics of the FLN, on one hand, from those who were exhilarated by them, on the other. …

Fanon’s jet-setting itinerancy and frequent obliviousness to the intricacies of local politics weren’t atypical among Third-Worldist celebrities. Che Guevara, like Fanon, became famous as a revolutionary leader in a nation that wasn’t his own. He then went on to hop from insurgency to insurgency, each venture less successful than the previous one, as his theories about guerilla warfare came up repeatedly against the hard reality that rural peasants tended to distrust gun-wielding foreign radicals. …

Although The Wretched of the Earth interweaves agit-prop with psychological observations and case studies, Shatz notes that there was a tension between Fanon’s two main activities that he didn’t overtly acknowledge. His “utopian proclamations about Algeria’s decolonized future” coexisted uneasily with his role as a doctor “bearing witness to the kinds of horror that nationalist fables are designed to make us forget.” Many of his most notorious—and widely quoted—statements invoke the cathartic function of violence in restoring the self-esteem of colonized people. But some of the case studies included in “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” the last chapter of Wretched, suggest rather different effects. He tells the story of an FLN fighter whose mother was killed by the French, and who in a spontaneous gesture of revenge stabbed a civilian Frenchwoman to death during a raid. But this act of violence, far from being therapeutic, occasioned constant nightmares in which he was haunted by his victim. Even after treatment, Fanon notes, “a serious deficiency remained in his personality.”

If Fanon urged a turn from the psychiatric to the political, the dominant modes of left politics that emerged in his wake—and absorbed his ideas—went in the opposite direction. As Christopher Lasch observed in The Culture of Narcissism, a great deal of 1960s radicalism served “as a form of therapy. Radical politics filled empty lives, provided a sense of meaning and purpose.” Ironically, the popularization of Fanon’s work in the First World formed part of this process. Before long, The Wretched of the Earth was perhaps most likely to be quoted by middle-class revolutionaries for whom politics was a form of therapeutic self-fulfillment, and “solidarity” with distant suffering populations in the Third World a source of catharsis.

A pretty picture methinks. From Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery. Nikoleta Sekulovic, Euphemia Gray, 2024, oil stick, graphite and acrylic on canvas, 190 x 145 cm

How life works

Philip Ball is a physicist turned science writer and has written an astonishing number of books on various topics, quite a few well outside science — like the history of Chartres cathedral. Anyway, he decided that someone really needed to write up what biology looks like today. Because as impressive as the progress that was made in the 20th century was, it was built on a set of presumptions that is becoming increasingly untenable. Those presumptions are standard reductionism — the assumption that one explains large things from their smaller components. It’s wonderfully more comlicated than that. But very difficult to work out.

Oh, and if you read nothing else, read the section “Fixing a Living Radio”, it’s fun!

Prologue

On June 26, 2000, US President Bill Clinton announced that scientists had completed a first draft of the human genome. That’s to say, they had deduced the sequence in which nearly all of the three billion chemical building blocks of our DNA are strung together. “Today,” he said, “we are learning the language in which God created life.”

He was wrong, but not (just) in the way you might think.

People are, of course, used to politicians saying wrong things (and not just about science). Yet the two scientists at hand did not rush to correct Clinton. On the contrary, one of them—Francis Collins, then head of the US National Institutes of Health, and now science adviser to President Joe Biden—went on to echo the same sentiment by celebrating this newfound ability to read “our own instruction book, previously known only to God.”

Many scientists will have bristled at these religious references, but truly that was not where the problem lay. (At least, not unless you are an atheist or a theologian.) The metaphors of the “language of life” and the “instruction book” of humankind are even today routinely used to refer to the human genome, which was analyzed (almost) in its totality by the international Human Genome Project (HGP) as well as by the privately funded parallel effort run by biotechnological entrepreneur Craig Venter, who was also present at the unveiling ceremony and is an avowed atheist.¹

More than two decades later, the information supplied by the HGP consortium, and by the subsequent sequencing of tens of thousands of individual human genomes, is proving to be a vital resource for biomedical research. That was always the hope, and a significant part of the mission. But not only has this information brought us little closer to understanding life itself; it has in some ways shown us that we are further away from such understanding than we thought. For if there is anything like a language of life, it will not be found in the genome—which does not resemble any instruction booklet ever made by humans.

Yet misleading metaphors for the genome remain as persistent and popular as ever. The “blueprint” is a favorite, implying that there is a plan of the human body within this three-billion-character string of “code,” if only we knew how to parse it. Indeed, the whole notion of a “code” suggests that the genome is akin to a computer program, a kind of cryptic algorithm that life enacts. The “book of life” has even been given a physical realization: it comprises a total of 109 distinct books, collected into 23 volumes (one for each of our chromosomes), in which page after densely spaced page are filled with the sequence of four letters (a, t, c, g) that represent the building blocks of DNA (fig. 0.1). I am happy to leave the reader to judge which book—that one or this one—offers a clearer picture of how life works. The aim of this book is to show why these metaphors are inadequate, why they need replacing, and why we will not understand how life works until we do. It also attempts to sketch out what might be put in their place.

There’s no shortage of alternative metaphors for the genome itself: it has been likened to a musical score, for example, or the script of a play. Some of these analogies are improvements, though none is perfect. But the key point is that looking to the genome for an account of how life works is rather like (this simile is imperfect too) looking to a dictionary to understand how literature works.

Fig. 0.1 The “book of life”? The human genome as recorded in 109 books produced from the Human Genome Project. Books made by Kerr/Noble. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

Wieringa added rather poignantly, “If I’m honest, I really did believe that cells and molecules [like genes and the molecules they encode] had a slightly simpler relationship.” We all did; the HGP was largely predicated on that belief. Ironically, the project itself has turned out to have offered one of the best reasons why we should relinquish such dreams of simplicity.

But the alternative is not necessarily to capitulate to the bewildering confusion to which Wieringa seems resigned. Instead, the findings of the HGP are an invitation to say “Of course it is not that simple! How could we have ever imagined that life itself could be? But what glorious, subtle, useful ingenuity we are finding in its place!”

Letting go is hard, however. The “instruction book” view of the genome persists precisely because the real story about how DNA and other molecules produce and sustain cells and organisms is not that simple. The metaphor offers consolation: it suggests a tidy tale that, even if it is wrong, seems preferable to muttering “Actually, it’s more complicated than that.” And it’s true that once you relinquish the idea that the “secret of life” lies in the genome—if only we knew how to interpret it—biology can look totally baffling. As I will show, just about all the neat stories that researchers routinely tell about how living cells work are incomplete, flawed, or just totally mistaken.

All the same, I believe we can do better. I will show how research in molecular and cell biology over the past several years has painted a richer and much more astonishing picture than that bleak and obsolete mechanical metaphor. The picture does at times appear fantastically baroque and perplexing, but in the end it takes the burden of control off the shoulders of the genome, relying instead on principles and processes of self-organization that, precisely because they have no need of tight genetic guidance, avoid the fragility that would engender. I must stress that there is nothing in this new view that conflicts with the neo-Darwinian idea that evolution shapes us and all other organisms and that it depends on the genetic transmission of information between parent and offspring. However, in this new view genes are not selfish and authoritarian dictators. They don’t possess any real agency at all, for they can accomplish nothing alone and lack a capacity for making decisions. They are servants, not masters.

Fundamentally, this new view of biology—which is by no means complete, and indeed is still only nascent—depends on a kind of trust. You could say that genes are able to trust that there are processes beyond their capacity to directly control that will nonetheless allow organisms to grow and thrive and evolve. (Biologists need to develop that trust too.) This way of working appears repeatedly in biology when things get complicated and tasks get hard. When organisms first became multicellular, when they became able to adjust to and exploit the full richness of their surroundings through sensory modalities like vision and smell, when their sensitivity and receptivity to the environment became genuine cognition, it seems that life increasingly relinquished a strategy of prescribing the response of the organism to every stimulus, and instead supplied the basic ingredients for systems that could devise and improvise solutions to living that are emergent, versatile, adaptive, and robust.

The new picture dispels the long-standing idea that living systems must be regarded as machines. There never has been a machine made by humankind that works as cells do. This is not to deny that living things are ultimately made of insensate and indeed inanimate molecules: we need no recourse to the old idea of vitalism, which posited that some fundamental and mysterious force made the difference between living and inert matter. Yet dispensing with the machine view of life allows us to see what it really is that distinguishes it from the inanimate world. The distinction is as fundamental and wondrous as the formation of the universe itself—but more amenable to scientific study, and for that reason probably more tractable.

In particular, life is not to be equated with that special kind of machine, the computer. It is certainly true that life performs kinds of computation, and indeed there are key features of biology that can be fairly well understood using the theory of information developed to describe modern information technologies. What is more, a comparison with machines can sometimes be a useful way of thinking about how parts of the process that is life operates. I will occasionally make such parallels. It is meaningful to say that our cells possess pumps, motors, sensors, storage, and readout devices. That, however, is very different from the modern trend of discussing the fundamental features of living organisms by comparing them to electrical circuits, computers, or factories. No computer today works as cells do, and it is far from clear that they ever will (or that this would be a good way to make a computer anyway). There is so far no technological artifact that provides a good analogy for living systems. These are a different kind of entity, with their own logic, and they have to be their own metaphor.

We are already somewhat familiar with this logic. We know that, to solve difficult challenges, it is sometimes best not to seek a particular, prescriptive answer by reductive means, but instead to give people relevant skills and then trust them to find their way to an effective solution—one that can be altered and adapted as circumstances dictate. We can now see that by organizing our human systems this way, we are simply reenacting at another level of the biological hierarchy the process already operating within us: we are utilizing the wisdom of how life works.

Central to this new view of life is a shift in the notion of what life itself is. The problem of defining “life” has bedeviled biology throughout its history, and still there is no agreed resolution. But one of the best ways to characterize living entities is not through any of the features or properties usually considered to define it, such as replication, metabolism, or evolution. Rather, living entities are generators of meaning. They mine their environment (including their own bodies) for things that have meaning for them: moisture, nutrients, warmth. It is not sentimental but simply following the same logic to say that, for we human organisms, another of those meaningful things is love.

One key reason for the failure of the machine analogy is that cells work at the scale of molecules, and things are different in the molecular world. They are noisy, random, unpredictable—and life does not so much battle to maintain order in the face of those influences as find ways to put them to good use. Life thrives on noise and diversity, on chance accidents and fluctuations. It simply couldn’t work otherwise.

There is, then, no unique place to look for the answer to how life works. Life is a hierarchical process, and each level has its own rules and principles: there are those that apply to genes, and to proteins, to cells and tissues and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system. All are essential; none can claim primacy. As Nobel laureate biologist François Jacob wrote, “There is not one single organization of the living, but a series of organizations fitted into one another like nests of boxes or Russian dolls. Within each, another is hidden.”

Thus, as Michel Morange, a professor of biology at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, has said, “Biological function emerges from the complex organization that spans the whole scale of life, from molecules up to whole organisms or even groups of organisms. Complex functions find their origin and explanation in this hierarchy of structures, not in the simple molecular components that are there to direct products of gene expression.” Life contains multitudes.

It is right to be amazed that it works at all. If, like Bill Clinton, you believe that credit for life belongs to God, I hope you might feel that They emerge looking far smarter and more inventive than the message of the Human Genome Project implied. If you don’t feel a need to find a place for God, then I encourage you simply to allow yourself to be enchanted by the genius of life.

Fixing a Living Radio

How we go about solving a problem reveals a lot about the nature of problem we consider it to be. In 2002, biologist Yuri Lazebnik, then at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, found a memorable way to illustrate how we typically study biology.

He recounted how, as an assistant professor, he sought advice from a senior colleague about the perplexing whirlwind of activity taking place in his field (the study of spontaneous cell death, or apoptosis). What happens in biology, he was told, is that researchers beaver away in their recondite corners until some unexpected observation makes many think that what was previously a mystery may be soluble after all—and what’s more, that this effort may result in a miracle drug. But as the topic booms and publications multiply in their hundreds or thousands, discrepancies and contradictions begin to appear, predictions fail, the problem looks harder than ever, and those drugs never materialize.

The generality of this scenario, wrote Lazebnik, “suggested some common fundamental flaw of how biologists approach problems.” To try to understand what that was, he followed the advice of one of his high-school teachers by testing that approach on a problem with a known solution. He set out to see if the methodology generally used in biology would work to show how a transistor radio works. How would that approach generally go? First, he wrote, researchers would persuade funders to let them buy a stack of radios that all work the same way, which they will dissect and compare with the broken one:

We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size. We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we would investigate whether changing the colors affects the radio’s performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some can discern some distortion) this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate.

Another approach would be to remove components one at a time. Occasionally, some lucky researcher will find a part whose removal stops the device working at all. “The jubilant fellow will name the wire Serendipitously Recovered Component (Src) and then find that Src is required because it is the only link between a long extendable object and the rest of the radio.² The object will be appropriately named the Most Important Component (Mic) of the radio.” And so on. Eventually, said Lazebnik, “all components will be cataloged, connections between them will be described, and the consequences of removing each component or their combinations will be documented.”

Only then will the crucial question have to be asked: “Can the information that we accumulated help us to repair the radio?” And can it? In rare lucky cases, a fix might work—but the biologists won’t really know why. Mostly, it won’t work at all.

So what’s wrong here? Lazebnik argued that biology is using the wrong language—a qualitative and sometimes personalized picture of “this component speaks to that one,” rather than the true circuit diagram of an electrical engineer. Lazebnik’s somewhat tongue-incheek paper made an extremely pertinent observation: the modus operandi of much of experimental biology might not be the one that will furnish a genuine understanding of how these systems work. Still, his prescription for doing better by developing a formalized engineering-style language was predicated on the analogy between a living system and a radio. He anticipated the objection that “engineering approaches are not applicable to cells because these little wonders are fundamentally different from objects studied by engineers.” But he felt this was akin to a belief in vitalism.

That objection does not, however, follow at all. What if instead a radio simply is not the right analogy—if biology doesn’t work like any engineered system we have ever created? What if its operational logic is fundamentally different? Then we will need something more than a better formal language. We will need a new way of thinking—albeit not one that need invoke any mysterious vital force. I believe that this is the situation we face, and that both the successes and the failures of much biological research in the past two or three decades point to this conclusion.

In 2000 cell biologists Marc Kirschner, John Gerhart, and Tim Mitchison made a tongue-in-cheek allusion to vitalism in calling for a better way to understand life than by a detailed characterization of its parts and of their modes of interconnection. They “light-heartedly” called such an improved view “molecular vitalism,” saying,

At the turn of the twenty-first century, we take one last wistful look at vitalism, only to underscore our need ultimately to move beyond the genomic analysis of protein and RNA components of the cell (which will soon become a thing of the past) and to turn to an investigation of the “vitalistic” properties of molecular, cellular, and organismal function.

In other words, we don’t need some tautological “life force,” but we do need to ask what it is that distinguishes life from the lifelessness of its components. Only then will we have much hope of truly being able to fix a “living radio.”

To keep life running, we have to do a lot of fixing. The body goes wrong often, mostly in small ways but sometimes in big ones. We have become fairly adept at the mending process we call medicine, but often by trial and error, because we didn’t have good manuals to work from, but only occasional glimpses of how this part or that functions.

Already the emerging new view of how life operates within us is prompting some rethinking of medicine—of how we design drugs, say, and why some diseases such as cancer are so hard to prevent or cure. Some researchers now suspect that it might be time to shift the entire philosophy underpinning medical research: for example, not to study and attack diseases one at a time, or to try to kill pathogens (that are typically smarter than us, adapting faster than we can retool our therapies) with bespoke magic bullets, but to take a unified view of disease. Many diseases wreak their effects through the same channels, and strategies for combating diverse diseases might involve similar or even the same approaches, especially involving the immune system.

And as we become more knowledgeable about where and when to intervene in life’s processes, we can start to think of life itself as something that can be redesigned. Efforts to do so systematically began with genetic engineering in the 1970s, but that typically only worked well for the simplest forms of life, such as bacteria. What’s more, it was limited by intervening only at one level of life’s hierarchy: genetics. It was by no means clear that every desirable goal could be attained by tinkering with genes, and we can now see why: because genes don’t generally specify unique outcomes at the level of cells and organisms.

Today we are beginning to redesign and reconfigure living entities, tissues, and organisms at several levels. We can reprogram cells to carry out new tasks and grow into new structures. We can create what some are calling multicellular engineered living systems: not mere blobs of living matter fed by nutrients in a petri dish, but entities with structure, form, and function, such as “organoids” that resemble miniature organs. Yet we are still very much in the foothills of this enterprise, trying to discern the rules that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves. As our knowledge and our techniques improve, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more profound. Some researchers believe that ultimately this will enable us to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even to create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.

A Glimpse Ahead

There’s a lot in this user’s guide because there is an awful lot to life. Modern biology is notoriously intricate, overburdened with fine details, arcane terminology, and impenetrable acronyms, and bedeviled by caveats and exceptions that make it nigh impossible to make any statement without qualifications and footnotes.

It’s my contention, however, that there is not just a lot to life. A common response to any attempt at generalization in biology is to say “Ah, but what about exception X?,” almost as if it were a solecism to try to glimpse beyond all the trees to get a view of the wood (or the forest, if you are in the United States). Yet it is surely not the case that life is just a dizzying mess of fine details in which every aspect matters as much as any other. That can’t be true, because no highly complex system can work that way. If this were how organisms are, they would fail all the time: they would be utterly fragile in the face of life’s vicissitudes. It would be like making a mechanism from a billion little interlocking cogs in which, if just one of them snaps or jams or falls out of place, the whole thing will grind to a halt—and then expecting this machine to work for eighty years or so while being constantly shaken vigorously.

No, there are sure to be high-level rules that govern life, which do not rely on the perfect integrity and precise placement of all its parts. But if they are not summed up in the idea that we are “machines made [and defined and governed] by genes,” then what are they?

It’s a curious paradox that, while in recent years these principles have been becoming increasingly apparent, at the same time they have tended to be obscured beneath an avalanche of data. Data can be very valuable, indeed essential, for discerning general rules and patterns, but only so long as we do not end up fetishizing the data themselves (by literally making books from them, for example).

We have become extremely adept at gathering biological data, especially about the sequences of genomes, the structures of proteins and other biomolecules, and the variety of molecular components in cells and the interactions between them. By analogy with the science of genomics, these data sets are typically suffixed as “-omes”: there are proteomes, connectomes, microbiomes, transcriptomes, metabolomes, and so forth. Thanks increasingly to the assistance provided by artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms, which can analyze far bigger data sets than humans can, we are able to survey and mine these -omes to glimpse the regularities and correlations within them. All this is immensely valuable, but in the end what it tends to offer are descriptions, not explanations. One sometimes senses that some biologists prefer it that way—that they hope data mining will suffice for making predictions, so that we don’t actually have to make sense of all the data or find coherent stories to tell about it. Instead, we can just rely on computers to find correlations between this data bank and that one. It’s not clear, however, that this alone will enable us to make more and better interventions for human health. It’s even less clear that it will act as a satisfying intellectual substitute for really understanding how life works.

With this in mind, I want briefly to suggest some of the themes and principles that will appear repeatedly in what follows, and which I hope might offer some common threads that can guide us through the challenging landscape.

Complexity and Redundancy: I once heard Nature’s former biology editor say very wisely that in biology the answer is always “yes.” (One might argue that it is in fact “yes, but. . . .”) By this she meant that there are many different ways that a process can happen—that a signal can be transmitted within a cell, that a gene can be switched on or off, that cells can assemble into a particular structure. Traditionally this feature has often been regarded as a kind of fail-safe mechanism: because interactions between one molecule and another can’t always be guaranteed to happen, evolution has provided backups. But in fact we’ll see that the logic of biological redundancy is often of a different kind: there is a fuzziness to the system, so that different combinations of interactions can have the same result, and a particular combination can have different outcomes depending on the context. This, it seems, is a better way to get things done in a microworld beset by randomness, noise, and chance fluctuations.

Modularity: Life never has to start from scratch. Evolution works with what is already there, even if this means redirecting it to new ends. We might (with great caution!) compare it to an electronic engineer who uses preexisting circuit components like diodes and resistors, and standard circuit elements such as oscillators and memory units, to create new devices. Thus life possesses a modular structure. This is most obvious in the way large organisms like us are assemblies of cells, as well as sharing common structures such as hearts and eyes. Modularity is an efficient way to build, since it relies on components that have already been tried and tested and permits the modification or replacement of one part more or less independently from the others.

Robustness: Life’s resilience is remarkable. After a summer of terrible drought that saw all of England turn yellow-brown, it has taken only a few heavy rain showers for the green to start reappearing. Life is not invulnerable, but it is extraordinarily good at finding ways through adversity (which the world supplies in dismaying abundance). We will never have adequately explained life until we can understand where its robustness comes from. No doubt the aforementioned redundancy is a part of that, but robustness features in many contexts: in the way most embryos grow into the “right” shape, wounds heal, infections are suppressed, and more broadly, life on Earth has sustained its continuity for close to four billion years.

Canalization: Life is what physicists might call a “high-dimensional system,” which is their fancy way of saying that there’s a lot going on. In just a single cell, the number of possible interactions between different molecules is astronomical—and there are around 37 trillion cells in our bodies. Such a system can only hope to be stable if, out of all this complexity, only a limited number of collective ways of being may emerge. The number of possible distinct states that our cells adopt is far, far smaller than the number of ways one cell could conceivably differ in detail from another. Likewise, there are only a limited number of tissues and body shapes that may emerge from the development of an embryo. In 1942 the biologist Conrad Waddington called this drastic narrowing of outcomes canalization. The organism may switch between a small number of well-defined possible states, but can’t exist in arbitrary states in between them, rather as a ball in a rugged landscape must roll to the bottom of one valley or another. We’ll see that this is true also of health and disease: there are many causes of illness, but their manifestations at the physiological and symptomatic levels are often strikingly similar.

Multilevel, multidirectional, and hierarchical organization: To understand how life works, there is no single place to look. You will never find all the explanations at (speaking both metaphorically and literally) a single level of magnification. What is more, each level in the hierarchy of life’s organization has its own rules, which are not sensitive to the fine details of those below. They have a kind of autonomy.³ At the same time, influences can propagate through these levels in both directions: changes in the activity of genes can affect the behaviors of whole cells and organisms, and vice versa.

Combinatorial logic: It has been estimated that humans can discriminate between around one trillion odors. Quite what that number means is open to debate, but it is clearly very much larger than the mere four hundred different “receptor” molecules in our olfactory system: there is evidently not a separate molecular detector for each smell. The different odor sensations must arise from different patterns of activation of this relatively small set of receptors. That is, the smell signals our brains receive are combinatorial. Think, for comparison, of how just three light sources (red, green, and blue-violet) in visual display screens can create a whole gamut of colors through differences in their relative brightness. Molecular signals that are combinatorial, rather than relying on unique molecules to supply different outputs, are widely used in biology, probably because they are economical in component parts, versatile, adaptable, and insensitive to random noise: all of them attributes that serve life well.

Self-organization in dynamic landscapes: Many things are possible in life, but not everything. Evolution does not select from an infinite palette: there are specific patterns and shapes in space and time that arise out of the complex and dynamic interactions between the components of biological systems, much as there are common features of cities or animal communities, or of crystal structures or galaxies. Think of it rather like rain falling on a landscape: the water itself is not programmed to flow in any particular direction, but the shape of the landscape causes it to gather in some places and to move away from others. The language of landscapes, basins, and channels is often useful in biology.

Agency and purpose: Agency is becoming something of a buzzword in some biological circles, especially those concerned with processes of cognition. The trouble is, no one seems able to agree on what it means. Intuitively, we might suspect that what distinguishes living organisms from nonliving matter is this notion of agency: they can manipulate their environments, and themselves, to achieve some goal. This makes agency inextricably linked to ideas about purpose. That is probably why the problem of agency has been (absurdly) neglected for so long in the life sciences, where questions of purpose have long been shunned as quasi-mystical teleology, perhaps only one step away from the dreaded concept of intelligent design. The result of this neglect and avoidance is that we can end up skirting around the most characteristic feature of all life. I propose that the time has come to embrace it—and that there is nothing to fear in doing so.

Causal power: One of the biggest obstacles to understanding how life really works has been a failure to get to grips with causation. It’s a hard problem, not least because causation is a vexed topic in its own right; philosophers still argue about it. We already know from daily experience how difficult it is to decide what counts as a cause of a phenomenon. Are the words appearing on my screen being caused by the impacts of my fingers on the keyboard, by electrical pulses within my computer’s silicon chips, or by the more abstract agency of my thoughts and feelings? But these questions are not intractable, and we do have some conceptual and mathematical tools for handling them. Too often, causation in biology, as indeed in the world in general, has been assumed to start “at the bottom” and filter up—so that, for instance, characteristics at the level of an organism’s traits are deemed to be “caused” by genes. As we’ll see, we can gain a better understanding of how life works, and how to intervene in it effectively, when we take a more sophisticated view of biological causation.

If everything in this book is correct, it will be a lucky miracle, and no reflection on my depth of understanding or intellectual powers. I suppose that is hardly a statement to inspire great confidence in what you are going to read, but the honest truth is that I am writing about issues that are still being debated by experts, sometimes with vehemence. Nevertheless, I believe there is no serious doubt that the narrative we ought to be telling about how life works has shifted over the past several decades, and it is time we said so. Given how increasingly important the life sciences—from genomics to precision medicines and research on aging, fertility, neuroscience, and more—are becoming in our lives, I believe this is nothing less than a duty. The historian of science Greg Radick has argued that we should “teach students the biology of their time,” and not the tidy simplifications concocted a half-century or more ago. He is right—but we should teach it to everyone.

The new story that is emerging is, it’s true, sometimes more complicated than the old half-truths. But I think this story is coherent, cogent, and consistently supported by many independent strands of research in genetics and molecular biology, cell biology and biotechnology, evolutionary theory, and medicine. Many of the details remain unclear and contentious, but the broad outline seems now unassailable and, I believe, exhilarating in what it tells us about the astonishing process that created a form of matter able to begin understanding itself: us. What’s more, this new view of life plugs us back into the universe. It does not replace or undo older ideas about natural selection but deepens them to help us see what is truly different and special about living organisms: what it really means to be alive.