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Excerpts from recent Amazon Reviews
The answer to The Selfish Gene
The answer to Richard Dawkins'
The Selfish Gene (from Amazon.fr)
Awesome
Denis Noble should be chained to a desk with a word processor
and be forced to write more books. (Matthew Hayward)
Puts Biology back into Biology
In the book he argues for a paradigm change in biology. This
book should be read by all potential systems biologists as it
shows how the term has been hijacked by those who secretly still
subscribe to the reductionist paradigm and who cannot truly
embrace how biology used to be. (Andrew Dalby)
Small in size; big on ideas
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. (Steve Benner)
Inspiration for a Systems Approach to Biology
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. (Daniel A
Beard) Science
The ending of the review in SCIENCE reads:
The Music of Life is a surprisingly, if deceptively, easy read. One
learns as much, if not more, on a second reading as on the first. Noble
presents his case for the systems approach with elegance and a simplicity
that hides unnecessary detail. His conversational style together with
personal vignettes give readers the feeling they are with him sharing in
an active process of discovery. The book can be recommended to anyone,
novice or professional, interested in systems biology and the foundations
of life.
The Guardian
Steven Poole on The Music of Life
Saturday July 8, 2006
The Music of Life by Denis Noble (Oxford, £12.99)
In this highly evocative essay, eminent physiologist Noble argues that a dominant metaphor in biology is blocking the path to further understanding. This is the notion that genes are the "program" of life and that they are its fundamental unit. Instead, the author shows, genes are merely a database and cannot do anything without other systems interpreting them, and there is ample evidence for "downward causation", in which higher-level systems and the environment affect the way genes work. Further, genes rely for their effect on chemical, physical and other properties of the natural world, which we all "inherit". (So much, Noble concludes poetically, for the notion of inheritance being solely via genes.)
The book begins with a stirring inversion of Richard Dawkins's famous "selfish gene" metaphor (we are the point of the genes "imprisoned" inside us, he insists, not vice versa) and works through some fascinating examples in Noble's own specialism of cardiology: the heart's rhythm, for example, is not predictable from our genes or even at the molecular level.
Stop thinking about computers: the better metaphor for life, he concludes, is that of polyphonic music.
SCOTSMAN
THE MUSIC OF LIFE
Denis Noble
Oxford University Press, £12.99
The science of molecular biology has yielded some remarkable results in the past 50 years or so - from the discovery of DNA to the sequencing of the human genome. In this short but very rich book, Denis Noble, a professor of physiology at Oxford, attempts to do for so-called "systems biology" what Richard Dawkins has done for the field of molecular genetics. Noble's claim is that the molecular approach, which is concerned with describing the constituent parts of organisms, is incapable of answering the fundamental question "What is life?" Living organisms are complex systems and understanding them requires abandoning the deterministic idea that the genome is a programme that "causes" life.
PERSPECTIVES IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE
Yair Neuman (2007)
The book ..... directs us toward a vision of
future systems biology. The great challenge of systems biology
is to study the "processual" language of the organism, otherwise
biology will be confined to the limited language of
reductionism. Noble’s little monograph is an excellent source
for students and researchers trying to confront this challenge.
His book is highly readable and recommended to all those
interested in the systems approach in biology and its deep
theoretical insights.
Crystallography Reviews 2009, 1–3,
iFirst
Anyone, including
myself, interested in structural biology and chemistry in
general and biological crystallography in particular, will find
this book extremely interesting. As with the book by Ernst Mayr
(2004) (What
makes biology unique? Considerations on the autonomy of a
scientific discipline, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press (reviewed for Crystallography Reviews by Fuller
(1)), the whole system versus the molecular biology is the
central theme. Mayr, of course, as an evolutionary biologist,
went further in covering population biology; whereas Noble
focuses more on systems biology. Denis Noble, CBE, FRS is a
renowned physiologist and systems biologist, specializing in
studies of the heart.
The sleeve of this
book makes immediately the link with physics
via the citation of the
book by Erwin Schrödinger ‘What is Life?’. As a physicist,
this was one of the key influences on me becoming interested in
biophysics as a research activity. The book sleeve remarks:
‘after the full mapping of the human genome has yielded a code
of three billion letters, we are still far from a satisfactory
answer to this question’ of ‘What is Life?’ The sleeve
continues: ‘The reductionist approach of molecular biology has
proved itself immensely powerful. But DNA isn’t life. It doesn’t
even leave the nucleus of the cell . . . .
To grasp
the nature of life we must move away from our obsession with
genes alone. We must look not at one level, but at the
interaction of processes at various levels, from the molecular
to whole organs and systems. This is the realm of systems
biology . . . . And life emerges as a process, the ebb and flow
of activity in an intricate web of connections, full of feedback
between gene, protein, cell, organ, body and environment. It is
a kind of music – a metaphor woven throughout this book’.
The book also
offers in its final chapters a description of the brain and
consciousness and then culture. Page 131, in the penultimate
chapter offers, as perhaps only a physiologist can, gradually
stripped away senses of the body and at what point a ‘self’
disappears. Not for the squeamish, but certainly a vivid
physiologist’s Occam’s razor. The last chapter and its links
with Zen Buddhism has as its quoted Zen parable: ‘Each beat and
each tune indescribably profound, no words needed for those who
understand music’. I found this book profoundly stimulating and
being a reductionist researcher myself allowed me to put into
context where we fit in.
John R. Helliwell
School of Chemistry, The
University of Manchester Manchester, UK Email:
john.helliwell@manchester.ac.uk
2009, J. Helliwell
From earlier readers'
reviews on Amazon It is one of the most important
books I have ever read....... It is rare to find a book with
so many well founded and important philosophical
implications of the scientific discoveries in our time. (Lars
Petter Endresen) (13 August 2006)
Finally someone with
knowledge and common (scientific) sense! 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.......... (Damir
Janigro) (31 August 2006)
The book is
a brain-stretching delight: an impassioned attack on narrow
thinking regarding evolution, whether from the general media
or other, specialised scientists. (K.
P. Harrison)
(25 October 2006)
I found this book really fascinating - it clearly explains
some very complex research and has an underpinning
philosophical thesis which is very thought provoking. In
some ways this book is autobiographical because Denis Noble
is at the later stage of his career and thinking back to how
his research interests have changed from being reductionist
through examining the individual components of the body, to
the development of a systems approach to living beings. His
points of reference include the Chinese language, buddhism
and large concert organs and these help to illustrate some
of the philosophical questions he is exploring in the
age-old quest to explain life, the universe and everything!
I'm going to re-read the book and ponder it further.....(C
Halstead, 18 July 2008)
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