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Life is amazing. Can anyone recommend good modern starting points to someone who would want to learn more about how living beings work (from bottom up)? It has

by rochak 5mo ago

Life is amazing. Can anyone recommend good modern starting points to someone who would want to learn more about how living beings work (from bottom up)? It has been a while since I actively delved into Biology (my school days).

Milpotel 5mo ago
I can recommend "The song of the cell" as a starting point. If you prefer textbooks, maybe "Life: The Science of Biology". I have a translated non-english copy and besides some math issues it's a nice overview, but I'm not a biologist.
- piva00 5mo ago
  I second "The Song of the Cell" as a good read, as a layman I can't judge the factuality of it but as a reader it was a very enjoyable journey.
morphle 5mo ago
The research into the origen of life looks at bottom up fundamentals (how they work) of all cells since the solar system was formed. You could start with the slides in this lecture and read the underlying papers and all the references in all those papers. You probably can find these references also in all the books he wrote. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBiIDwBOqQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBiIDwBOqQA Maybe an educational text for the laymen has summarised this recently but I'm not aware of one. Most Biology from your school days have been rewritten. I will have to re-read Molecular Biology of the Cell, 7th Edition, 2022. I read the 3th edition and it has changed dramatically since. You can download it on Anna's Archive or order it at the usual suspects https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Molecular+Biology+of+the+Cell%2C+7th+Edition&i=stripbooks-intl-ship&crid=3BUHJCC237VNK&sprefix=molecular+biology+of+the+cell%2C+7th+edition%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C175&ref=nb_sb_noss_2 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Molecular+Biology+of+the+Cell%2C+...
nataril 5mo ago
Get any modern undergraduate Intro Biology textbook like Campbell. These are fantastic books: beautifully illustrated and clearly written, and way better than popular science books at the mall bookstore. The first few Units cover all the basics: chemistry of life and energy, molecular biology, cell biology, and genetics. From there you can branch out into anything.
- mncharity 5mo ago
  > Get any modern undergraduate Intro Biology textbook [...] These are fantastic books Curious how perspectives vary. I would have said there's basically nothing available, textbooks being horribly wretched. I don't know of anything which takes a "bottom up", rough quantitative, engineering first-principles intro to cell bio, let alone to biology. No whys and hows of building close to thermal noise energy levels. No focus on pervasive multi-scale cross-cutting strategies for localization and compartmentalization. No energy budgets, not feel for reasonable numbers, no... sigh. When you see a nifty foundational insight mentioned in passing in a research talk, it's a really good bet it won't be in textbooks any year soon. One of the causal threads leading up to TFA, the Harvard bionumbers database, was born out of someone's 'it's absurdly hard to find numbers'. Chatting with a cell bio tome publisher years ago, about what absurdly implausible resources would be needed to do something transformatively better, the snark for "but it has 100 authors!" was "nifty - and how many for the second page?". Maybe now with AI we can start nibbling away at this faster.
  - nataril 5mo ago
    > engineering first-principles intro to cell bio Very true, these books are qualitative. There's a bit of basic math around delta-G for reactions and Chi-sq tests for genetic associations, but the conventional undergraduate introductory biology course is 99% descriptive. There are reasonable arguments for taking that approach. These courses are foundations for subsequent study, with the intended outcome that students have a broad but shallow understanding of core basic ideas. Lots of biology makes intuitive, mechanistic, and visual sense, much like introductory computer science and introductory chemistry. Obviously applied math plays a key role in biology but it tends to address specific needs like protein structure prediction, dynamic modeling of transcription/translation and metabolism, inferring phylogeny, high-throughput 'omics analysis, network simulation of epidemic outbreaks, and so on. These are great to study, but without the broader context the understanding would be relatively fragmented, lacking the big picture. Rereading OP's question: > good modern starting points to someone who would want to learn more about how living beings work (from bottom up)? I interpret that as wanting a general understanding, starting with chemistry and working upwards towards evolution and populations. That's all in the standard two-semester introductory course, hence my book recommendation. If that's wrong and OP wants a math-centric approach, here are a few gems: Physical Biology of the Cell, Phillips, et. al An Introduction to Systems Biology, Alon Evolutionary Dynamics, Nowack
o_nate 5mo ago
I'm currently reading (and enjoying) "How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology" by Philip Ball. It proceeds from the bottom up: the first half is all about cells and smaller structures. Pretty readable but doesn't gloss over complexity.

by rochak 5mo ago

Milpotel 5mo ago

I can recommend "The song of the cell" as a starting point. If you prefer textbooks, maybe "Life: The Science of Biology". I have a translated non-english copy and besides some math issues it's a nice overview, but I'm not a biologist.

piva00 5mo ago
I second "The Song of the Cell" as a good read, as a layman I can't judge the factuality of it but as a reader it was a very enjoyable journey.

morphle 5mo ago

The research into the origen of life looks at bottom up fundamentals (how they work) of all cells since the solar system was formed. You could start with the slides in this lecture and read the underlying papers and all the references in all those papers. You probably can find these references also in all the books he wrote. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBiIDwBOqQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBiIDwBOqQA Maybe an educational text for the laymen has summarised this recently but I'm not aware of one. Most Biology from your school days have been rewritten. I will have to re-read Molecular Biology of the Cell, 7th Edition, 2022. I read the 3th edition and it has changed dramatically since. You can download it on Anna's Archive or order it at the usual suspects https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Molecular+Biology+of+the+Cell%2C+7th+Edition&i=stripbooks-intl-ship&crid=3BUHJCC237VNK&sprefix=molecular+biology+of+the+cell%2C+7th+edition%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C175&ref=nb_sb_noss_2 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Molecular+Biology+of+the+Cell%2C+...

nataril 5mo ago

Get any modern undergraduate Intro Biology textbook like Campbell. These are fantastic books: beautifully illustrated and clearly written, and way better than popular science books at the mall bookstore. The first few Units cover all the basics: chemistry of life and energy, molecular biology, cell biology, and genetics. From there you can branch out into anything.

mncharity 5mo ago
> Get any modern undergraduate Intro Biology textbook [...] These are fantastic books Curious how perspectives vary. I would have said there's basically nothing available, textbooks being horribly wretched. I don't know of anything which takes a "bottom up", rough quantitative, engineering first-principles intro to cell bio, let alone to biology. No whys and hows of building close to thermal noise energy levels. No focus on pervasive multi-scale cross-cutting strategies for localization and compartmentalization. No energy budgets, not feel for reasonable numbers, no... sigh. When you see a nifty foundational insight mentioned in passing in a research talk, it's a really good bet it won't be in textbooks any year soon. One of the causal threads leading up to TFA, the Harvard bionumbers database, was born out of someone's 'it's absurdly hard to find numbers'. Chatting with a cell bio tome publisher years ago, about what absurdly implausible resources would be needed to do something transformatively better, the snark for "but it has 100 authors!" was "nifty - and how many for the second page?". Maybe now with AI we can start nibbling away at this faster.
- nataril 5mo ago
  > engineering first-principles intro to cell bio Very true, these books are qualitative. There's a bit of basic math around delta-G for reactions and Chi-sq tests for genetic associations, but the conventional undergraduate introductory biology course is 99% descriptive. There are reasonable arguments for taking that approach. These courses are foundations for subsequent study, with the intended outcome that students have a broad but shallow understanding of core basic ideas. Lots of biology makes intuitive, mechanistic, and visual sense, much like introductory computer science and introductory chemistry. Obviously applied math plays a key role in biology but it tends to address specific needs like protein structure prediction, dynamic modeling of transcription/translation and metabolism, inferring phylogeny, high-throughput 'omics analysis, network simulation of epidemic outbreaks, and so on. These are great to study, but without the broader context the understanding would be relatively fragmented, lacking the big picture. Rereading OP's question: > good modern starting points to someone who would want to learn more about how living beings work (from bottom up)? I interpret that as wanting a general understanding, starting with chemistry and working upwards towards evolution and populations. That's all in the standard two-semester introductory course, hence my book recommendation. If that's wrong and OP wants a math-centric approach, here are a few gems: Physical Biology of the Cell, Phillips, et. al An Introduction to Systems Biology, Alon Evolutionary Dynamics, Nowack

o_nate 5mo ago

I'm currently reading (and enjoying) "How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology" by Philip Ball. It proceeds from the bottom up: the first half is all about cells and smaller structures. Pretty readable but doesn't gloss over complexity.