[B]iochemical pathways that produce the basic building blocks of life are... conserved across practically all… — Nick Lane

[M]etabolic flux... Even a simple bacterial cell can undergo... a billion trnasformations per second... is... what being alive is.

The driving force of is thermodynamics. ...[I]n this context ...the chemical need to react (to dissipate energy) in the same way that water needs to flow downhill.

The double helix of DNA... is composed of two long chains [of 'letters'] that snake around each other... each strand providing an exact template for the other. ...[E]ach strand ...contains just four types of letter, with ...billions ...arranged down... the chain. ...3,000 million letters ...make up the human genome ...[T]he same — the same lines of code — can have different effects depending on the context.