The music of life

In The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins argued that the gene was the most important part of living things. In The music of life:biology beyond the genome Denis Noble argues against such a reductionist viewpoint. He uses the metaphor of music, saying that just as a printed score or the data on a CD don't represent the emotional effect of a musical piece, so our genes don't code for the full complexity of a living organism. Others have made a similar claim, but in this case it is made by someone who has done significant work in computational biology and certainly knows what he is talking about.

Indeed the question in my mind was how much does Noble really escape from reductionism. One example he gives is of how in the early days of computing he wanted to model the operation of a heart. Computer time was precious, and one of the arguments against him was that his model had no obvious oscillation to represent the beating of the heart. No indeed, the beat arose as an emergent property of the model. But I would ask whether this is really anti-reductionist, or simply reductionism in another guise.

The later chapters look at the nature of consciousness, arguing against the physicalist philosophy, and claiming that there is more to our minds than simply the sum of our neuronal actrivity. Here Noble is on much shakier ground - it's worth reading for some of his thought provoking ideas, but don't expect any cut-and-dried answers.