Life Without Genes: The History and Future of Genomes (2000) 15/11/05. Reviewed by Jon Turney Adrian Woolfson's dreams of biologies past and present.

Biology these days is about much more than real organisms. Whether they exist now or lived in the past, the creatures we know are a tiny subset of all the creatures that might have been, or could be. Adrian Woolfson's mind-expanding book offers an approach to this more complete view, which shows how much biological thinking has changed in the age of information.

For Woolfson, any possible creature, like any other thing or event in the universe, can be defined by information. Not just genetic information, although despite the title much of the book is about genes, but a composite of genes, development, environment and culture. All exist in an abstract mathematical space, which natural history searches and samples. But that evolutionary search only gives us a rather arbitrary selection from the sea of possibilities. As we come to understand the rules for putting organisms together, we shall be able to sample new kinds of life made to our own design.

All this is presented through clever analogies, beginning with plastic model kits and moving through the largest toy store in the universe to the more elaborate conceptual spaces in which the descriptions of potential organisms reside. The book has a sense of intellectual playfulness that makes it appealing as popular science. Woolfson's dizzying imaginary journeys into gene space, and other even more extensive spaces, give a whole new meaning to 'thought experiments'. But there is no doubt that they are ultimately serious. For the point is not just to devise metaphorical vehicles for exploring information space. This is a practical as well as a theoretical project.

In fact, this extremely abstract approach to biology goes along with an attitude to life that takes it for granted that it is destined to be reshaped by intelligent design. As he puts it, when we really understand how organisms have been built in the past, "Life will enter a new realm of history. It will no longer lie in the exclusive and capricious historical domain of chance and natural selection. It will instead be possible to design and construct new living things using a historical processes, in much the same way that we currently design and construct motor cars, traffic lights, helicopters and vacuum cleaners."

That certainly gives a new twist to current debates about genetically modified crops or designer babies. The space of possibilities is so large, Woolfson argues, and the time evolution has had to operate so short, that there is every reason to suppose that the vast unexplored regions of biological potential harbour creatures we will want to bring to light. By the same token, the ones that are already alive have no special significance. They just happen to have been realised in actual rather than mathematical space. From a theoretical point of view, they have in a sense always existed, and always will.

You may end up thinking that that 'in a sense' cloaks some rather murky metaphysics, but there's no getting round the fact that the book lets you into the thinking of the very model of a modern biologist.

Book details

Hardcover 432 pages (January 17, 2000)
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0002556189