Denis Noble and the Music of Life: What a Tangled Web of Metaphors We Weave

Denis Noble is a brilliant man and a fantastic scientist, as he tells us in his own book, however; the same may not be said about his style of writing. The main theme of his book is that there is no program for life; the genome cannot simply be used as a blueprint to build an organism on its own. The organization of the book includes ten chapters, each one using a different musical metaphor to describe life, starting from the genome and going all the way up to the brain. Noble attempts to make his views of biology easier to understand to the reader by using current metaphors of biology and then rewriting them. Oddly enough, he states that “… there are of course always limits to the validity of metaphor. They are ladders to understanding. When you have climbed them, you can throw them away.” While Noble seems to know his science, he should probably stick to doing research and not to writing books on the metaphors of biology.

The first chapter is called, “The CD of Life: the Genome.” Noble introduces the reader to imaginary creatures called the Silmans who appear several times throughout the book. They are silicone based life forms and they are used by Noble to compare the genome to a CD, stating that it is simply a code that must be deciphered. After showing how senseless the Silmans are, the reader realizes that the Silmans are actually metaphors to describe that early scientists were ignorant for thinking that DNA is the “program of life.” Noble then goes on to explain why the “Reductionist Causal Chain” (basically that genotype leads to phenotype) sounds too simple to be correct. A recurring theme throughout the rest of the book is for Noble to make ideas much more difficult than they really need to be. Noble very effectively ...

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... to RNA and the translation to proteins, as well as gene expression. Noble does an excellent job of presenting an opposing view to the central dogma of biology, using metaphors to attempt to make his differing views clearer to the reader. While Noble does use a lot of scientific evidence to support his opinions, his use of metaphors is overwhelming and it can easily distract the reader from the point that he is trying to make. ,Nobles’ explanations of gene expression help the reader to understand the process of evolution, giving a more or less clear view as to how redundancy in the genome can lead to variation. Noble neglects, however, to expand upon natural selection or any other ideas related to evolution. If these ideas were present, they were lost somewhere between the overwhelming use of metaphors and the overly detailed explanations of cell signaling processes.