I've been reading another textbook on the same topic recently, and find it endlessly fascinating. I can grok quantum mechanics intuitively on some level, becaus

I've been reading another textbook on the same topic recently, and find it endlessly fascinating. I can grok quantum mechanics intuitively on some level, because it's governed by simple mathematical laws, even if those laws are quite different from everyday experience of how physical objects work. Understanding how ordinary matter (atoms, molecules, then solids and fluids) forms out of fundamental interactions is, in principle, just a matter of solving for N variables, and you can use statistics when N gets large. But the complexity of how life exploits the precise interactions between thousands of different molecules to assemble complex machines, on scales from single proteins to whole organisms, involving thousands of interconnected feedback loops to sustain the process and counteract the large-N averaging effect of the second law of thermodynamics, is just mind-boggling. If you're a programmer and think 10 million lines of code constitutes a complex system, reading about how cells work on a molecular level should be humbling.