Review - The Music of Life

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Review - The Music of Life - Denis Noble

Once upon a time Richard Dawkins told the world a story - The Selfish Gene was without doubt one of the breakthrough popular science books of the twentieth century. But Denis Noble is worried that we have been misled by metaphor in books like this. The suggestion that the genes are somehow in charge, running things to their benefit, is easy to get carried away with, though Dawkins only ever intended that "selfish" bit to be an illustrative metaphor, not an absolute truth.

In order to counter this idea, Noble demonstrates with sweeping detail, just how much genes are just a small cog in the machine that is life. He portrays very effectively the idea of a complex system, in which genes certainly play a major part, but which they can't be seen to control in any way.

That's the good news about this slim, rather elegantly styled book.

Unfortunately, what Noble also demonstrates is that the business of constructing a good metaphor is harder than it looks. His attempt to use a musical metaphor for life, with the genome as a CD and genes as organ pipes just doesn't work. It creaks under the strain and collapses, leaving the reader less enlightened than if he hadn't used it. He also makes the mistake of sinking, particularly towards the end, into a degree of pseudo-philosophical/mystical woffle that helps no one. I thought we'd grown out of attempts to merge Zen and science, but no, here we go again.

Noble is at his best when he gets down to specifics. His description of his experience in the early days of computing, fighting a mainframe while trying to understand the mechanism that controls heartbeat, is far and above the best part of the book. But the coverage of the more general issues, partly masked by the unhelpful musical metaphor, doesn't work anywhere near so well.

Noble's point is important - many people do put much too much emphasis on Dawkins' metaphor and so do misunderstand the concept of the selfish gene in a big way - but the book could have been a lot better.

Only in hardback

Reviewed by Jo Reed

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