There is a new movement in biology in which researchers and scientists come to a new understanding of the qualities and properties of life. The science journalist Philip Ball, author of the book “How Life Works” investigated these insights of biologists who are expanding and transforming our understanding of life. In an interview with evolve he days:
“I do see an increasing awareness that we need to reinstate life at the center of biology. Thinking about living things in terms of what their molecules are doing, how they're interacting, is necessary to understand how biology works, but by that stage you've lost life itself. There is no life in a protein, or in a strand of DNA. I see an increasing awareness that we need to keep in view the fact that with life we are talking about a kind of matter that is qualitatively different from inanimate matter, from a rock, from the air, from water. There is something about living systems that is still deeply mysterious, and incredibly wonderful. That wonder, that specialness of life, needs to be at the center of biology.
This view is reflected in an increasing focus from many biologists on the whole organism, rather than thinking that we're going to get all the answers by going down to the level of genetics. It's the organism as a whole that we're trying to understand. That starts with the level of the cell, which is the smallest unit of biology that is still demonstrably alive.”
In many researchers he sees a sentiment of wonder and reverence coming back into scientific investigations, which could lay the foundation for a new biology of wonder: “We need to start any consideration of how life works and what life is with a sense of reverence. We need to remember to be astonished at what we're finding. We need to be astonished at this fact that the bits of the universe have come together and become aware of themselves. It sounds perhaps overly poetic to put it that way, but it's literally what has happened. And that is so extraordinary. We should never lose sight of the extraordinariness of that. That's really what I'd love to see happen in biology: the return of a sense of reverence for the living world.”
In our evolve LIVE! Seminar we together will explore the insights of the new biology and what they show us about the deeper dynamics of life. We will investigate what that implies for our relationship to the living world. In the process of dialogue we will also connect to the aliveness of awareness in which wonder can touch and transform us.
