How Life Works Audiobook By Philip Ball cover art

How Life Works

A User’s Guide to the New Biology

 Preview

Audible Standard 30-day free trial

Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection of titles.
Yours as long as you’re a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Standard auto renews for $8.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

How Life Works

By: Philip Ball
Narrated by: Philip Ball
Try Standard free

$8.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $25.53

Buy for $25.53

Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.

In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels, each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time).

With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.

Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the life sciences, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2023 Philip Ball (P)2025 Tantor Media Biological Sciences Biology History History & Philosophy Science
All stars
Most relevant
The content is quite engaging, as is always the case with Ball’s work. But this is the first of his books I’ve listened to that he reads himself. We all respond differently to different accents and speech patterns so you might find his tone wry and engaged. I’m unfortunately finding it so nasal as to be exhausting.
It’s a long book if you aren’t comfortable with the voice - listen to a sample before committing

Needs a professional narrator

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Builds a base slowly of biological development then discusses the new understandings in the field of biology

Fascinating possible view of what is known about life

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Philip Ball’s writing is always brilliantly clear, but this book is challenging, especially in the early chapters. Stick with it, it’s worth it. He begins at the molecular level and then builds up from there, arriving at the organism and then moving on to questions involving medicine and synthetic biology. Occasionally he blurs the line between popular science and a scholarly survey article, but the book is jammed with insights and ideas and left me with a new understanding of life itself.

Very high level popular science

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A verbose yet unconvincing attack on Darwin and Dawkins using semantics and logical fallacies with absolutely no science whatsoever.

Semantic Pedantry

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.