The gene-as-blueprint story is wrong and Ball’s argument is that biological science has known it for a while without saying so out loud. The human genome came in at around twenty thousand 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 but worth it: The payoff is that life stops looking like a machine and starts looking like weather holding a shape.
How Life Works