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The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes 1st Edition

by Denis Noble (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 115 ratings
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The gene's eye view of life, proposed in Richard Dawkins acclaimed bestseller The Selfish Gene, sees living bodies as mere vehicles for the replication of genetic codes. But in The Music of Life, world renowned physiologist Denis Noble argues that, to truly understand life, we must look beyond the "selfish gene" to consider life on a much wider variety of levels.
Life, Noble asserts, is a kind of music, a symphonic interplay between genes, cells, organs, body, and environment. He weaves this musical metaphor throughout this personal and deeply lyrical work, illuminating ideas that might otherwise be daunting to non-scientists. In elegant prose, Noble sets out a cutting-edge alternative to the gene's eye view, offering a radical switch of perception in which genes are seen as prisoners and the organism itself is a complex system of many interacting levels. In his more expansive view, life emerges as a process, the ebb and flow of activity in an intricate web of connections. He introduces readers to the realm of systems biology, a field that has been growing in strength in the past decade. Noble, himself one of the founders of this field, argues modern systems biology may be the view we need to adopt to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of life.
Drawing on his experiences in his research on the heartbeat, and on evolutionary biology, development, medicine, philosophy, linguistics, and Chinese culture, Noble presents us with a profound and very modern reflection on the nature of life.
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  1. ISBN-10
    0199228361
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0199228362
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    Oxford University Press
  5. Publication date
    April 7, 2008
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    7.74 x 5.05 x 0.49 inches
  8. Print length
    153 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

`Review from previous edition A beautifully written book... After the great successes of molecular biology, the time has come to re-assemble the organism. Denis Noble tells us why this needs to be done. He also tells us how we should go about it. Strongly recommended. ' Sir Patrick Bateson, F.R.S., Emeritus Professor of Ethology, Cambridge`highly evocative essay' Steven Poole, The Guardian

Book Description

A short, personal, and lyrical essay that uses the metaphor of music to present a broader and more expansive view of life

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; 1st edition (April 7, 2008)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 153 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0199228361
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0199228362
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.74 x 5.05 x 0.49 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 115 ratings

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    Denis Noble

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Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
115 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Daniel C. Hall
5.0 out of 5 stars Real Science
Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2014
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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.
9 people found this helpful
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David Dickenson
5.0 out of 5 stars A superb look at the nature of life
Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2022
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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.
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Andy M
5.0 out of 5 stars This little book left a profound impact on my scientific worldview.
Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2019
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I read this book more then a decade ago during my PhD studies in Molecular Biology. Now that I have my own PhD students, looking back, I realize that it left a profound impact on my scientific thinking. I wish more scientists get exposed to the well-articulated ideas pointing that one cannot adequately understand the biology from the exclusively gene-centric, reductionistic perspective, which still strongly dominates the field, limiting innovation and scientific progress. I also liked the prose and almost poetic metaphors. Great read.
4 people found this helpful
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Thomas C. Hamilton
4.0 out of 5 stars The Genetic Symphony
Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2016
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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.
16 people found this helpful
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Ecodreamer
3.0 out of 5 stars The Wrong Title
Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2022
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As a musician, I assumed that this book might marry my love of music and the natural world. Not true. It is a good introduction to systems biology as far as that goes, but the musical metaphor is merely a thin veneer, and, frankly, doesn't really add to the subject. If you're looking for a book on systems biology, this is a good introduction (4 or 5 stars), but as for a musical interface, look elsewhere.
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Top reviews from other countries

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Ricardo F. Oliveira
5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente livro de Denis Noble
Reviewed in Brazil on July 13, 2021
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Excelente livro. Nele, Denis tem combatido a ideia generalizada de que os genes determinam o individuo num caminho de via única
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Alexander antonowicz
5.0 out of 5 stars Tolles Buch! Hat mir beim Biologiestudium geholfen und auch so ein interessantes Buch für jeden
Reviewed in Germany on October 19, 2023
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"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.
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EG
5.0 out of 5 stars Most interesting for biologists and philosophers alike.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 12, 2023
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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!
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James
5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant book by Denis Noble that goes against the doctrine ...
Reviewed in Canada on May 24, 2018
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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!
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Cliente de Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Todo bien
Reviewed in Mexico on August 13, 2018
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Todo bien
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