The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes

Science these days is so tangled up with Politics that one has a difficult time catching one's breath between party line pronouncements by the national Academys of Science. Do NOT improvise is their message. Do NOT think outside the box for heaven's sake; you never know who might be watching!. This book, by a first class scientist, is not any kind of theistic rant, although I'm sure it has been characterized as such by the post modern flat earthers at the NAS. I have no idea what Denis Noble's religious or philosophical preferences might be. Nor do I care. The message born by this little book is that neo Darwinism along with the entirety of it's "genetic determinism" baggage is finished. Flat dead. Reductionistic methods in every scientific field have produced the most extraordinary explosion of human knowledge imaginable over the last 200 years. Scientific reductionism really is at the core of how we think and how, for the most part, we must continue to think. It allows us to keep our thoughts in order. It is essential. But it has also led us to a standstill in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology. Fortunately the Chemists and Mathematicians have avoided the trap; they simply have no dog in the fight. I've also been generous and included Cosmology as a science here out of respect for what it might have one time been. Alas, it was long ago hijacked by philosophers and a few physicists with less than stable personalities. Others have followed simply because they imagined there was no place left to go. Who would have thought for instance, that after the fifty years of great Physics leading up to Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga finally fleshing out QED, that the physical sciences would descend into 50 years of entanglement in strings and multiverses; neither of which have a shred of testability or connection to anything visible. This is sad you know. There is an entire generation of brilliant minds and hopeful careers completely wasted on a pair of stupid ideas. Oh well. But, Noble doesn't talk about that. What he talks about is the dead end created by reductionism in the Biological sciences. He's a physiologist. He's the guy that created the first workable computer model for the beating heart. He's a serious scientist. The book asks us to consider a systems approach to biology. He does not wish to destroy scientific reductionism but rather to understand it's limitations and to suspend the bottom up or top down epistemology long enough to observe how certain "qualia" or singular elements from within the system inform it's development from inside. The system is not just reductionistic; it is flexible in the direction of it's information pathways. Dr. Noble says it better than I just did, but that's the essence of the argument. This is HERESY at the NAS, and Noble knows that. This is a good read for any of us. It is short, to the point, and avoids unnecessary complexity. If you want to get complex, start working through his source notes and bibliography. He backs everything up with hard numbers.

Noble begins by comparing his ambition to Schrodinger's classic, What Is Life? He even considered giving his book the same name, but thought that might be a bit pretentious. Pretentious or not, this book is truly masterful in its ability to critique gene determinism and to show why life is much more complex, and brilliant, than we might think if we think of our genes simply as the instructions that build us, step by step, from the bottom up. "Systems Biology" proclaims that it is not so simple as that. Along the way, he tackles some important philosophical questions. By comparing life at each step to musical phenomena, along with various other "everyday" examples, Noble carries along the popular reader like myself admirably, while also demanding much as he teaches truly profound and paradigm altering concepts. Highly recommended.

In "The Music of Life", Denis Noble introduces the general public to the revolution which has been going on in genetics for several decades. Most people imagine that DNA is a sort of program for an organism. One analogy which accurately expresses the conventional view is that of a recipe. DNA is a set of instructions for building a sequence of proteins, folding the proteins into particular shapes, and organizing those proteins into tissues, organs, and the whole organism. The biggest problem with this view, according to Noble, is that it is false. Reading this book as a layperson requires one to pay attention, and I would recommend taking notes. Still, the exposition is lucid and fascinating. According to Noble, the genome is not so much a program as it is an orchestra. Individual genes can be understood as notes, and the music of life originates not by a sequence of one note played at a time. Instead, the genes can express collectively in nearly an infinite variety of ways, and it is the patterns of gene expression which produce a symphony. For example, Noble notes that genes are divided into exons and introns. Exons are the portions of the genes which specify amino-acid sequences, and introns are the portions which separate the exons from one another. RNA transcribes the DNA sequence, removes the introns, and arranges the exons into various orders. The same gene can be used to produce a wide variety of proteins because of the different orders into which the exons are arranged. Moreover, the same gene can be expressed in many different organs and functions, and an organ is always the result of different patterns of genetic expression more than it is the result of different genes. This is why the human genome was so much shorter than expected, a mere 20,000-30,000 genes, instead of the 100,000 which had been predicted on the basis of the traditional view. Noble also uses the functioning of the heart to explain how biology, in order to be representative of an organism, must be holistic. The rhythm of the heartbeat cannot be reduced to a single function in the heart. Instead, it emerges from the collective cooperation of different proteins and systems in the cardiac tissue. The principal problem I had with the book was Noble's confused chapters on the mind-body problem at the end of the book. I did not get the impression that Noble is well-acquainted with the philosophical dimensions of the issue, and equivocation plays a problematic role in his attempts to solve the problem within his holistic framework. For example, Noble suggests that the concept of the distinct "self" or "I" is not present in Eastern religions because Eastern religions have never subscribed to Cartesian dualism. Well, there are many sorts of dualism besides the Cartesian sort, and Cartesian dualism is not the only kind of substance dualism. To say that the concept of subjective experience is not present because the philosophical explanation of subjective experience is not identical to Cartesian dualism is absurd. Similarly, he describes how the deprivation of sense experience leads to a breakdown of one's concept of self and uses this to suggest that the self is the result of sense experience. The problem is that there is a time lag between the deprivation of sense experience and the breakdown of the concept of self: if the two are present together for even one moment, then the latter is not dependent on the former in the logical sense. Furthermore, one's concept of self is not identical to the irreducible property which is subjective experience. One can have subjective experience without having a sense of self. While Noble nominally rejects the view that consciousness is an epiphenomenon, he appears to merely reject the view that consciousness can be localized to a particular region of the brain, arguing instead that consciousness is the result of the whole system in interaction with itself. Noble's issue is that he seems to collapse the notion that consciousness is the result of the interaction of moving parts with the notion that consciousness is the interaction of moving parts. While the latter would be a sort of holistic materialism (which, frankly, is not any superior to reductive materialism, philosophically speaking), the former would be property dualism. There were times where it seemed like Noble was expressing a kind of property dualism, but ultimately, I'm not sure Noble himself understood what view he was attempting to articulate. A more direct dialogue with contemporary philosophy would have been helpful. Despite this drawback, the scientific aspects of the work are phenomenally interesting, and I recommend it to anyone curious about the way in which the genome is a tool of the organism rather than the organism itself.

I thought this was a well thought out book and the author makes his points very nicely. It's a really easy read and written by someone who knows his subject really well. It's an impassioned argument and his criticism of the genocentric view of biology is well made. I think he's really on the money and shows a really deep understanding. It's also good to hear a biologist's take on complexity, as opposed to a mathematician or physicist, etc. I love using metaphors myself when writing, but perhaps it went a little too far, some of it was unnecessary. A great read, to be highly recommended to anyone who wants to understand how the body works.

"The Music of Life: Biology beyond Genes" von Denis Noble ist eine faszinierende Reise in die Welt der Biologie und Genetik. Dieses Buch hat mich in vielerlei Hinsicht beeindruckt und meine Sichtweise auf biologische Prozesse grundlegend verändert. Noble präsentiert die Idee, dass die herkömmliche Genzentrik, bei der Gene als dominierende Akteure angesehen werden, eine zu vereinfachte Vorstellung von biologischen Abläufen darstellt. Er argumentiert überzeugend, dass biologische Prozesse nicht allein von den Genen gesteuert werden, sondern dass zahlreiche andere Faktoren, wie epigenetische Modifikationen, Zell-Zell-Kommunikation und die Umgebung, eine entscheidende Rolle spielen. Das Buch führt den Leser durch eine faszinierende Reise von den Grundlagen der Genetik bis hin zu komplexen Themen wie Evolution und der Entstehung von Bewusstsein. Dabei bleibt Noble stets verständlich und greift auf zahlreiche Beispiele zurück, um seine Argumente zu untermauern. Eine der Schlüsselbotschaften des Buches ist, dass das Leben mehr wie Musik ist als wie ein einfacher genetischer Code. Die verschiedenen Elemente des Lebens interagieren in einem harmonischen Zusammenspiel, das weit über die schlichte Abfolge von DNA-Basen hinausgeht. Insgesamt ist "The Music of Life" ein fesselndes Buch, das Wissenschaft und Philosophie auf beeindruckende Weise miteinander verknüpft. Es regt dazu an, die Komplexität des Lebens in einem neuen Licht zu sehen und bietet eine inspirierende Perspektive auf die Biologie jenseits der Gene. Für jeden, der an Wissenschaft und den grundlegenden Fragen des Lebens interessiert ist, ist dieses Buch ein Muss.

A wonderful explanation that makes us think deeply about the phenomenon of life.

Denis Noble's cutting edge research & thought has never quite found the mainstream traction of his contemporaries like Dawkins or Cox. He is however highly revered in the circles of intellectual ideas and natural philosophy, and this book outlines his main criticism of Neo-Darwinism in his characteristic plain and clear prose. He draws on his huge range of interests outside science, and writes in an engaging style that always follows the progression of logic as he sees it. This isn't a wide ranging book - it sticks close to his theme of bidirectional gene expression and mutation, but I found it interesting as a scientist, and had to prize it out of my father's hand, who is a philosopher!

A brilliant book by Denis Noble that goes against the doctrine of Dawkins and his orthodoxy. His description of intent is very clearly articulated - first from the reductionist point of view as a complicated and ultimately meaningless series of electrobiochemcial reactions, to a systems biology explanation - that intent is not a result of physiology, rather it is that which initiates me pointing to the hat when asked where the hat is. The Dawkins world view is the tail wagging the dog. Noble says it's the other way around, and I agree with him - the self is not a neural object!

Todo bien