The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes

Great book. Dennis points out that genes are regulated by negative feedback from the very protein that codes it. Obviously, the negative feedback occurs on the cells membrane. Dr Thomas N. Seyfried proved that the cells membrane had a bigger effect on cancer than the cells DNA just by merely swapping the nucleus between cancerous and non cancerous cells. See "Cancer as a metabolic disease: implications for novel therapeutics." The surface of the cell acts as a control mechanism. Michael Levin, Tufts University, discovered that he could control morphogenesis by controlling the outer cellular membrane.On page 35, the Dennis says that there are no genes for the fatty lipids that form the cell membranes. Here is how they are formed: "EZ Water and the Origin of Life". The protein negative feedback can occur nonlocally: Spin-Mediated Consciousness. EZ Water forms our body consciousness inside our microtubules and meridians: The acupuncture system and the liquid crystalline collagen fibers of the connective tissues.

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.