Customer Reviews

The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes

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Dr. Noble is one of the most creative physiologists of our time, and not surprisingly he decided to put an end to the endless "DNA craze" affecting scientists and media alike. In an era where everything is "genetic", Dr. Noble lucidly unmasks the pitfalls of gene-centrism, to reveal the powerful and obvious societal and organismal influences that govern gene expression. This little book does not deny the work by Dawkins and Gould (frequently and appropriately cited) but rather redefines the modern Darwinism of life in a more holistic, and scientifically acceptable perspective. The devil is in the details, and we have been fooled for too long by those who only see the music notation of life and not the whole symphony!

I honestly really enjoyed reading the book "The Music of Life" - it is one of the most important books I have ever read. Denis Noble's analogy between life and music is an important one. Just as music cannot be understood by investigating single notes at a time, one cannot investigate life by looking at single genes only. The interplay between genes, between genes and proteins, and between proteins is just as important as the genes themselves.

What makes this book particularly interesting is the combination of state of the art knowledge in many totally different fields - it is rare to find a book with so many well founded and important philosophical implications of the scientific discoveries in our time. I had to read this book twice to really appreciate all the beautiful metaphors, and I would recommend this book to everybody that enjoyed Erwin Schrödinger's book "What is Life" - this book is an update.

This little book is a real treat. Among other things, it is a timely rebut of the genome-mania that has dominated biological science and popular attention paid to it over the past decade. This is not to say that Noble's book is an anti-genome book. On the contrary, Noble presents the view of the genome as not more (or less) than another few molecules that make up the complex interacting soup of life.

One of the gems in this book is Noble's description on the combinatorial explosion associated with the seemingly straightforward task of developing gene ontologies--the assignment of biological functions to genes. Noble explains in simple terms why it is practically impossible to enumerate necessarily immense set of high-level functions associated with a specific gene, and why the quest to map functions to genes or genes to functions is a hopeless task unless one adopts a systems view.

While The Music of Life is build around analogy, one of the crucial messages of the book is that there is great danger in mistaking analogy for theory in science. Noble's deconstruction of Dawkins' "selfish gene" analogy is a striking example. Noble's essay reveals that some of the great current debates in biology, such as that of the Dawkins view versus the Gould view of evolution are really scientific debates no more than they are arguments about the aesthetic qualities of competing metaphors. From a perspective that seeks rigorous testable hypotheses, the selfish gene is perhaps no more rigorous an idea than a god delusion.

The only nitpick that I have with this book relates to Noble's demonstration of emergent phenomena, using the rhythmic behavior of a cardiac pacemaker cell membrane potential arising from the integrated behavior of a collection of autonomous channels and pumps. Perhaps exaggerating to make a point, Noble describes the keepers of the Mercury computer of London University as oblivious in 1959 to the possibility that periodic solutions could arise from autonomous equations. Surely such behavior should not have been outside the experience of a mathematician, physicist, or engineer in 1959. In fact, even in biology the famous Hodgkin-Huxley model had for years been known to show emergent oscillatory behavior. Noble's professed amazement at the emergence of periodic behavior from his model equations may be an autobiographical fact. But I suspect that the real amazement was in the ability of the model equations to simulate observed behavior quantitatively in terms of not just the phenomenon of oscillations, but the size and shape of the period waveforms. In 1959 Noble was working before the age of instant compiling, online debugging, and rapid nonlinear parameter estimation. To effectively model cardiac pacemaker electrophysiology from the channels up in 1959 was indeed an amazing demonstration of emergent behavior in biology.

This is a very rare work, exceptional insight not only into functioning of the heart, but also into understanding of the life in general. View of a scientific, but also of an artist. Two thumbs up.

Denis Noble describes his short book, "The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes", as a polemic. It is, in fact, a clarion call for a rethink to the reductionist dogmas that currently plague--and hinder--so much scientific thinking, particularly in the field of biology and, most especially, genetics. Professor Noble is not, of course, alone in making this call (see, for instance, Stuart Kaufmann's "Reinventing the Sacred" or "Evolution in Four Dimensions" by Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb) but he presents a particularly clear-sighted argument which few others have so far matched. His is a far-reaching and eminently readable disquisition, attacking first the popular metaphor articulated primarily by Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" (and promulgated endlessly--usually incorrectly--by science popularists ever since) that genes are the engines of evolution and each genome a comprehensive "program of life". Throughout his book, Noble turns that view around with a different and far more accurate metaphor, presenting the genome as a database from which the organism can select in order to call upon an elegant modularity of gene expression in a bewildering display of inventiveness of response to environmental and physiological conditions.

Along the way, the author uses a series of music-related analogies to extend his metaphor and piece together the various fragments of his argument into a coherent look at the biology of the organism as a fully functioning system, operating on and at many levels. He shows that far from the established view where the arrows of explanation all point downwards to the lower, ever more fundamental elements of cellular physiology (ending up ultimately at DNA as the primary explanatory element) there exists in reality a complex system of feedback pathways which enable the organism to act upon its own genetic material, altering the way that each gene is expressed in combination with others as a consequence of their whereabouts within the organism, or the conditions to which the organism may be subjected. Within this systems view of biological functioning, the complex pathways of interaction become the primary explanatory elements, rather than any of the physical components themselves.

This single insight provides several additional mechanisms for the operation of evolution through natural selection over and above the simplistic one of random gene mutation which is held in such high regard by today's neo-Darwinists, and reopens the door to the long-ridiculed notion of so-called Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics. It also calls into question the wisdom of, for instance, neurologists seeking the physical location of "the self" within the prescient organism; within Noble's view of things, such concepts as "the self" cease to have any likelihood of an actual physical presence (as separate, identifiable entities within the organism) but instead become emergent functional properties of a level of operation of the biological system itself.

It should be clear by now that this book presents serious challenges to a great deal of current biological dogma and there will be many readers for whom this book is an eye-opener. It is an easy and entertaining read for anyone with even a smattering of science and regardless of whether or not you finally come to agree with Denis Noble, you can be sure you'll find what he has to say interesting and enlightening.

This is a book that anyone interested in understanding the nature of life should read -- not life as a collection of genes, or even as a collection of proteins, but life as a system of interactions. Denis Noble doesn't try to do away with reductionism altogether, but to use reductionism in a less simple-minded way than is often done. He accepts, as any sensible biologist must, the importance of the genome, but he rejects the idea that the genome is all there is.

In the first chapter he examines the famous passage in which Richard Dawkins first expressed the concept of the selfish gene ("Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots...") and then, without distorting any of the facts, rewords it in a way that totally changes the emphasis ("Now they are trapped in huge colonies, locked inside highly intelligent beings..."). Whether you finish by preferring his version to Dawkins's or not, you can hardly escape feeling that he has raised some serious doubts about an over-simple interpretation of the relationship between genes and organisms. For myself, I think that Dawkins's version was an essential step towards moving from an individual-centred view of evolution towards a view that recognized the importance of the gene, but Noble is right to emphasize that one shouldn't take it too far.

Much later in the book there is a brilliant description of sexual intercourse that should utterly dispose of any simplistic ideas of "Lamarckian" inheritance of acquired characteristics as "wrong" and opposed to the "right" idea of Darwinian natural selection. (I put "Lamarckian" in quotation marks because Noble does, for the very good reason that Darwin was no less of a "Lamarckian" than Lamarck was, and he became more of one with each successive edition of The Origin of Species.) We are back here to points of view: if we consider individuals, then inheritance is by natural selection, but if we consider each (multicellular) individual as a colony of cooperatively interacting cells, then inheritance is "Lamarckian". A liver cell, for example, has exactly the same genome as a muscle cell from the same individual, but liver cells divide to produce liver cells, never muscle cells: clearly some characteristic that a liver cell has "acquired" during its formation (and not just its genome) is being passed on to its descendants.

As a researcher Noble is known for his development over half a century of a mathematical model of the heart that can faithfully reproduce many of its properties. In that sense he was a systems biologist long before anyone thought of this vogue term. The importance of this for the general theme of the book is that it establishes that he is not a holist in the mystical sense of the term, as he clearly recognizes that an organ as complex as the heart can be represented in mathematical equations based on the known properties of its components, but only if their interactions with one another are taken into account.