The Life Beyond Molecules and Genes

What makes us alive? Is it our DNA? Our genetics? Is it our molecular or even our atomic composition? Somehow, all of this feels radically dissonant from our everyday experience of life. In Life beyond Molecules and Genes, experimental biologist Stephen Rothman makes the bold case that instead it is our adaptive abilities, hewn by evolution that make us alive. In making this point, he reveals a hidden harmony between science and life as we live it.The traditional understanding of adaptive properties (e.g., the abilities to obtain food, avoid predators, procreate) has been that they are actions of living things or traits that they express. Rothman makes the provocative statement that this foundational element of the theory of evolution by natural selection is entirely backward. Our adaptive properties do not exist because we are alive, but rather we are alive because they exist. The implications of this understanding turn the modern materialist perspective on its head by revealing that life transcends its material nature.For more than a century, the field of biology has focused on the task of identifying and cataloging life s chemical substances, while ignoring its grand question: What is it that makes us alive? With Life beyond Molecules and Genes, perhaps the field will move a bit closer toward an answer.Stephen Rothman is an emeritus professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. He was an experimental biologist for more than forty years and is presently engaged in a writing project that considers some of biology s most vexing questions. He has written or edited seven books and published more than two-hundred articles in Nature, Science, and other prestigious scientific journals."