The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

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.

Noble has summarized the importance of non reductionist thinking in the life sciences extremely well with this book. He has made a compelling argument that is highly relevant to life sciences, using metaphor, analogy and several clear examples from recent developments in genomics and proteomics, that (as Anderson wrote in 1972) - "More is Different."

I intend to use this as a primer in my applied / integrative physiology courses - am hopeful that students in the health sciences would help pave the way toward a more integrated understanding of health through a more integrated understanding of life itself.