{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Oxide and Friends","title":"Bookclub: How Life Works by Philip Ball","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":6639,"description":"The long-awaited Oxide and Friends bookclub! Bryan and Adam were joined by special guest--and real life biologist--Greg Cost to discuss Philip Ball's terrific book, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. Spoiler: Alan Turing makes a very expected appearance!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Greg Cost.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:The Turing patternRNA as a precursor to DNAXenopus frogXenobotsAnton computerBryan's reading notesCentral themesPower and limitations of metaphor – especially mechanical onesThe fundamental, diametrical opposition between life and machines. (Nature does not use simulations!)Rejecting the neo-Darwinian paradigmPassages of note:p. 91: “of the common SNPs seen in human populations, fully 62 percent are associated with height” … “the most common genomic associations for complex traits like this are in the noncoding regions” What is cognition? p. 137: “Life is, as biologist Michael Levin Jeremy Gunawardenaand philosopher Daniel Dennet have argued, ‘cognition all the way down’” AlphaFold2 p. 148 “AlphaFold does not so much solve the infamously difficult protein-folding problem as sidestep it. The algorithm makes no predictions about how a polypeptide chain folds, but simply predicts the end result based on the sequence.”p. 156: allostery refers to how a🤯 p. 160: “The popular view that science is the process of studying what the world is like needs to be given an important qualification: science tends to be the study of what we can study.”p. 166: “The misfolding pathology of PrPs (prion proteins) is the price paid for the benefits of disorder. … Disordered proteins can increase the complexity and versatility of our regulatory networks, but at the cost of increased risk of toxic aggregates formed from misfolded proteins.”p. 181: “The [training] analogy is far from perfect, not least because proteins don’t need to be ‘trained’ to acquire their roles.” Ball...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/cVYTzMGAZ_7gNn2i7iJYSuWlQOM4wHdJAzEuWrnLo9A/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS80OGI3/NjA5NWY4Yjc4NzE0/ZGI5ZmMzZmY4MjFi/YThiYy5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}