The gene-as-blueprint story is wrong, and Ball’s argument is that biology has known it for a while without saying so out loud. The human genome came in at around 20,000 genes, fewer than a water flea, and it turned out most of them don’t map onto traits in any tidy way. What he lays out instead is a system with causation running in every direction — proteins that have no fixed shape until context gives them one, RNA doing work nobody assigned it, cells behaving as agents, whole organisms pushing back down on the molecules. It’s dense and worth it, and the payoff is that life stops looking like a machine and starts looking like weather that holds its shape.
How Life Works