Understanding Living Systems

Life sciences

About

Life is definitively purposive and creative. Organisms use genes in controlling their destiny. This book presents a paradigm shift in understanding living systems. The genome is not a code, blueprint or set of instructions. It is a tool orchestrated by the system. This book shows that gene-centrism misrepresents what genes are and how they are used by living systems. It demonstrates how organisms make choices, influencing their behaviour, their development and evolution, and act as agents of natural selection. It presents a novel approach to fundamental philosophical and cultural issues, such as free-will. Reading this book will make you see life in a new light, as a marvellous phenomenon, and in some sense a triumph of evolution. We are not in our genes, our genes are in us.

Reviews

‘This spirited, delightfully readable and accessible refutation of genecentred biological orthodoxy offers a convincing account of living organisms as active agents and living systems, creatively shaping and responding and adapting to their environments. The authors propose that life resides in the purpose and creativity of the whole organism. Living organisms are not their genes, nor are they determined by - or reducible to - their genes. Instead, genes are tools that the organism actively adapts to further the ends chosen by the organism itself. Written for the non-specialist, while founded on decades of highly respected academic research, the authors’ systems approach to our understanding of living organisms heralds a welcome return to common sense and an urgent resetting of our relationship to the natural world in the face of imminent environmental collapse.’

Pauline Phemister, Professor of History of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, UK

About the Authors

Raymond Noble is Honorary Associate Professor at the Institute for Women’s Health, University College London.

Denis Noble is Emeritus Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology, Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford.

9781009338592

Paperback

AUD $28.95 / NZD $31.95

Available October 2023