The Music of Life

This book vindicates my long-held view that biological objects do not act in isolation but interact with other things to make a living whole. It confirms my opinion that genes are not the master controllers of living things.

Furthermore, it showed me that systems occur at different physical scales (molecules, cells, organs, organisms, populations), that the systems at these scales influence each other, and that no scale is dominant. To understand biological/medical phenomena, including human consciousness, one must look at the (multi-scale) systems, not their individual components, in isolation. 

Finally, I found it a lot of fun to read because… show more.

This short and lucid book by an eminent molecular biologist shows how our DNA and its genes do not act as a blueprint that dictates everything, as assumed by selfish-gene theory.

Rather, there’s a fascinating ‘systems biology’ of the DNA and its surrounding biomolecular ‘circuits’, which act like electronic circuits in many ways. Different parts influence each other. So there are influences on the DNA as well as from the DNA. Noble likens the DNA to a musical recording, which can influence our mood but not dictate it.