Evolution: Real but Not Random

A conversation with renowned biologist Dennis Noble

Check out The Heart Revolution Film and panel discussion here or below.

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Best known for his pioneering work in systems biology and for shaking up traditional views in evolutionary biology, Dr. Noble spent decades at the University of Oxford, where he held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology from 1984 to 2004. Now an Emeritus Professor, he’s still active, challenging the status quo with a career that spans over six decades.

Video

Transcript

Adam Jacobs: I have just had the pleasure of completing your work dance to the tune of life. Enjoyed it immensely. I learned a lot, and you introduced me to a brand new topic: the concept of relativity as applied to biology. So, I think many people out there know the concept of relativity as it applies to physics and cosmology, but for the sake of the audience, could you explain for a moment what relativity means when it applies to biology?

Dennis Noble: Yes. Einstein had two principles or series of relativity, one special relativity, which concerns how you explain the speed of light being constant, that there is no ether, and so on. That's not the one that is the main comparison. His second theory was the theory of general relativity, which explains the principle that big objects in the universe distort the medium in which those objects move so that you get light moving around other objects instead of very directly through.

The idea here is that all forms of causation are two-way. The object distorts space time, space time also distorts how the objects move now to come to biology, I see exactly that in biology, the electrical potential on a cell running for example, the pacemaker of the heart naturally constraints all the molecular components to respond to that potential change. But at the same time, many of those molecular components are providing the electric charge movement. That itself changes the potential. Once again, there is a relativity of causation, so it's the relativity of causation that is the key. I developed that into the principle that biological systems have no privilege level of causation. It's as simple as that. I think once those terms are explained, most people will understand them.

Adam Jacobs: I think you talk about the implications of that understanding, and one of them is, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you start with the position that everything is built out of atoms and molecules, then you could easily conclude that the net result is something that is arbitrary and not meaningful. However, if you…

Dennis Noble: Exactly.

Adam Jacobs: Okay, and that is the root of physicalism, is it not?

Dennis Noble: Absolutely. So yes, that's right.

Adam Jacobs: Okay, so then how would you articulate the discovery of relativity in biology? Why is that important for modern people to know about?

Dennis Noble: It's extremely important to our concept of ourselves as living organisms and particularly relevant to humanity, but I think it's just as relevant to the octopus as to us. Just to give one example, and incidentally, this is also what Charles Darwin thought. He gave agency and choice, meaningful choice, for example, in sexual selection to birds, particularly birds. But he meant, of course, that it applies to any organism that is free enough to choose what it wants to do in life. Not only that, but that itself changes the evolutionary process. The intentionality of an organism it determines who you meet with, what could be more important in an evolutionary process, and the transmission to the next generation.

Adam Jacobs: So some people would argue that people aren't really free to choose their mates, that it's a deterministic process that was set in motion actually millions of years ago, and it had to go like this, and there's an illusion that you are making a freewill decision. I have to assume that you disagree with that premise.

Dennis Noble: Absolutely. So. Well, this, of course, is the position that many standard evolutionary biologists take. Jerry Coyne simply says it's an illusion. You think you are free to choose, but it is a magnificent illusion which has been developed as a consequence of the evolutionary process. It is also present in and implied in Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. He writes that their genes created us, body and mind. I'm not sure what he really means by that. I've debated with Richard many times, and I had indeed discussed with him, but I don't think he fully understands what he's trying to say there because the gene-centric view, which is effectively the determinist view that from our genes and proteins, you could essentially predict me.

What was predicted as an idea all those 300, nearly 400 years ago, and it doesn't work. We found that scientists working on the predictive ability of gene sequencing by a team at University College London published last October, actually October of the previous year, 2023, in the British Medical Journal Medicine, and what they did was the precise tests that you need to do, which is see whether the, what are called the polygenic scores, that's the adding up of all the association levels between particular genes and a particular disease state. You add them up in order to get the total contribution of maybe 300, 400, or 500 genes to a particular complex disease, and you then ask the question you would ask of a drug presented to the FDA for approval, does it work? Does it predict what diseases you will have? The answer is disappointing. No,

There are almost as many false positives, meaning incorrect predictions, as there are correct predictions, and that's terrible. It did not predict cancer. It does not predict cardiovascular disease, and similar findings have been found. For some of the mental diseases like schizophrenia and Alzheimer's, we've been looking in the wrong place. The way I put it is to say this is a bit like looking at the pixels in a message rather than understanding the message itself. So my answer is very simple. It does not work by the standard criteria of scientific investigation, and gene deterministic prediction fails.

Now, that's big because we are an aging population, and those diseases are not yielding to gene interpretations. It is going to be a big challenge for health systems to deal with this. So this is not just an arcane philosophical argument that scientists lots of us are having. This has very serious consequences. Furthermore, I think if you teach people that they are, in effect, the placing of their molecules actually demotivate people to be creative and exercise agency, it's not a neutral statement to say you are the plating of your genes.

Adam Jacobs: So I know that Dr. Dawkins didn't really mean this, and I think that maybe this is part of your confusion when you debate him, but he seems to almost give agency to the genes, and I think he would say, no, I'm just being metaphoric. That really, of course, there's nothing happening whatsoever, but at the same time, when someone like Dr. Coy or Dr. Dawkins invests so much time and energy in trying to convince people that there's meaninglessness in the world, I find it to be funny. Would they argue that they had no choice but to write their own books and do the research?

Dennis Noble: Indeed, yes. I couldn't agree more. First of all, when challenged by the philosopher Mary Midgley in 1979, three years after the publication of The Selfish Gene, she referred to it in passing this metaphor, the selfish gene Richard responded two to three years later. That was no metaphor, provided you use words in the way biologists now use them. Now I asked myself the question, what is a metaphor other than taking an expression and applying it outside his normal range of application? He almost doesn't see what a metaphor means. Put that to one side for a moment, interpreted metaphorically. It also is a tautology. In his latest books, he admits that he might have chosen the title The Cooperative Gene.

Which we believe is, of course, we can be selfish, and we can be cooperative, but we have the same genes when we do one compared to the other. I can be very cooperative at a nice dinner party where I'm feeling good. I can be quite selfish if I find that somebody's looking to steal my money or whatever it might be, I will be quite ferocious. Now, I don't change my genes between those two forms of behavior. It's simply a misunderstanding and, again, a dangerous one because it demotivates people. We need to get back to the principle that underlies all forms of social interaction between humans, that there are principles that we subscribe to and that are meaningful. You Can't subscribe to principles that have no meaning.

Adam Jacobs: That seems obvious to me, so I tend to agree with you. I think that this question really boils down to the big picture of purposefulness versus purposelessness. And I wanted to ask how far it goes in terms of science and biology and what your understanding of it is. In other words, are you willing to use the term teleology as a scientist?

Dennis Noble: Yes, absolutely. I think you have to.

Adam Jacobs: And how far down does it go? Would you say that the molecules also demonstrate purposefulness?

Dennis Noble: No.

Adam Jacobs: So where does it start?

Dennis Noble: It's a very interesting debate. I once had this debate with his holiness, the Dalai Lama, precisely, and he told me exactly the question you asked me, how far down would you go, professor? I said, well, you could go down as far as you can, but what I didn't think to say at that point was, oh, and by the way, don't try to go down just to molecules. Molecules are just chemicals. There's an energy of association and dissociation. Once you know those, it's predictable entirely. So when replication occurs of DNA, the Cs, Ts, As, and Gs try to link up in the way they normally do.

They've pretty good self-replication up to a certain point, which is about one in 10,000 errors versus one error in around 10,000 base pairs linking up. We have 3 billion. There's room there for around close to a million errors, and indeed, that is the case. What then happens is the cell, the living organism that comes in with effectively a small army of six, seven, or eight, cut and paste enzymes that are then organized and orchestrated to make sure that nearly all of those errors are corrected. It's an action by the organism. It could not survive if it didn't do that. It's doing that, I would say, in order to survive.

Adam Jacobs: How does it know to do that? How would the chemicals know how to behave that way?

Dennis Noble: No, the chemicals don't know at all. No, you're quite right. It is only here that we come to the principle of biological relativity. Again, because it can only be a network that is open to interactions with the environment, including interactions with other organisms, that to which you can validly attribute choice, the molecule has no choice. Now, that may raise the question, but if we're just made of molecules, doesn't that mean there's no choice anyway, but remember the principle of biological productivity. If you have an enclosing mass, which is the cell in the case of a unicellular organism or the surface of the organism, if it's a multicellular organism and all kinds of structures within it, they're all constraining what the molecules can do.

Molecules themselves don't know. They just bash into a membrane and go out again, or they go through the membrane. It just depends on chance, which happens, but that structure constrains what the individual molecules can do all the time, and you see that in the mathematics of what you need to use to describe it. I'm a mathematical biologist. I integrate the differential equations for the movement of the particles and the chemicals as and when they are constrained by the structure, which is also in the model and gives the freedom.

The molecules are no longer free to move wherever. It's whenever a cell is constraining those molecules that you get freedom of action by the cell as a whole and then, in turn, by organisms that form the cells, so it all connects. One needs to understand the principle of biological relativity in order to understand that point there, as it were a kind of triangle of openness down at the molecular level. It's zero. The molecules can't decide anything. They just do chemically what they must do. But up at the level of the whole organism in interaction with its social environment, there's massive openness and, well, even at a society level, stoke ethnicity, which is chance events. We all depend on that. Sometimes, we rely on a chance event to discover who we're going to marry. Well, so be it.

Adam Jacobs: Okay, very good. Let me pivot for a second and focus on evolution, right? I'm curious, what do you think of the work of the Discovery Institute and specifically of Michael Behe's work is focusing on irreducible complexity? I know that they get a lot of heat in terms of their interpretation of evolutionary theory, but do You have a feeling about it either way?

Dennis Noble: What I feel about an issue like that one is that it'll all depend on what we eventually find in investigating the origin of life, and it is difficult to answer that question in advance. My own instinct on this is that what some people call autocatalytic sets, which would be networks of interaction, may have developed on early Earth in all kinds of places. Most of those would've become dispersed because if you don't constrain the process, even if it started amongst a group of molecules that are interacting continuously and can continue doing that if you don't have a constraint, they will disperse.

Now, the various possibilities for those kinds of constraints; one is that it could be that cracks in the earth itself, in the rocks of the earth in hot vents, could easily have provided at least a temporary form of constraint to make sure that developing sets interacting in a continuous way, maintaining the interaction, could have been constrained enough for at least certain periods of time to keep on doing that. But the major step then would be the formation of a membrane. Once you've got a membrane, the constraint is permanent.

And provided the membrane doesn't burst, of course. Now the good news is that if you take lipid that's fatty substance and you drop it into a solution, it will a water solution, it will automatically form little bubbles. So, on that side of the issue, we don't have to make any very major assumptions about the chemistry. We already know that that is what would happen. So my own instinct is to think that the origin of purposefulness, and that is characteristic of a living organism because it continues to exist as long as it can maintain itself and have the right input of energy and output of products so that purposefulness can have come from the constraints and it comes back again to the principle of biological relativity.

Now, we don't know the full details of that. People are working very hard to see how it might have arisen as a series of steps, but it seems to me that until we fully understand that process, it's best to have an attitude that is well in dance to the tune of life. The last chapter is called the Relativity of Epistemology, to admit that sometimes we don't know. So my approach to this issue is to say we don't really know yet, but I have a suspicion that sometime we are going to know the answer to that.

Adam Jacobs: Yeah, I would like to, and I know that there are certain key problems that the scientific community wrestles with, one of them being the origin of the nature of consciousness and one of them being the origin of life, which I know your friend Perry Marshall and you explore, which is so baffling and from what I understand, mathematically baffling, biologically baffling, and people have been working on it for many decades, and to the best of my knowledge, we don't have any great leads to explain it just yet.

Dennis Noble: I think that's right. That's why I take a position of neutrality in relation to, yes, we can all make guesses, but that's what we're doing at the moment.

Adam Jacobs: Okay, fair enough. So, of course, there are dogmatic approaches on both sides.

Yeah, so there's a scientist that I like that I'm sure you're familiar with, named James Shapiro indeed, and he has a website called The Third Way in Evolution, which sort of rejects the creationism, let's call it the poof. Life came out of nowhere, but it also seems to reject Neo Darwinism or at least the mechanism, and therefore, it is looking for this third option. Whenever I ask people about Professor Shapiro's work, I often get a scoffing from the people who I speak, and I wonder at it because I say he just published a 700-page peer-reviewed book on this topic. So my question is two: Part one is why there is reflexive resistance to people like him, and two, how up-to-date would you say the general public's understanding of evolution actually is nowadays?

Dennis Noble: A long way from being up to date? Let's unpick this one carefully. First of all, James Shapiro learned a lot of what he then applied in his own research to show as he did, the ability of bacteria, in particular, to control their genomes under stress, they will hyper mutate, and the reason he got onto that is that he worked with the great early botanical geneticist, Barbara McClintock.

McClintock showed, even in the 1930s and 1940s when she first started publishing it, that a plant like corn will change the arrangement of its genes under stress. She did it by observing the chromosomes and noticing that sections of one chromosome would actually move to be integrated into another one. These are the mobile genetic elements which form the basis of Jim Shapiro's work. Now, that work was completely ignored. It was published in the Journal Genetics in the, I think this is in the 1950s. Nobody took any notice of this very crystal clear, though you can look at the paper, and it's absolutely clear the bits of chromosomes are moving around 30 years later; in 1983, she was awarded the Nobel Prize precisely for the discovery of mo genetic elements. There is no reason to scoff at Barbara McClintock. There is no reason to think that her results were incorrect or crazy, except that they challenge a fundamental assumption of neo-Darwinism: the process by which genes change is entirely random.

Once you agree that an organism can orchestrate moving its genes around, even if that process is stochastic, it still does it, and then it can be selected from by the organisms themselves. That's how bacteria can easily develop all kinds of reactions to stress upon them, and so do plants. So I think the first thing to say is that there's nothing to scoff at in James superior's work or Barbara McClintock's work. In her case, even winning the Nobel Prize did not change people's minds. Wow. Now, why did that?

I think that the Neo Darwin synthesis is a very cleverly produced synthesis of many ideas, some of them dogmatic. There is no transmission of body characteristics to the germline. Well, that one has been broken. We now know there are particles that carry information about germline development to, sorry, Soma development, the body development in interaction with the environment that can be carried to the nucleus of the germ cells, and there's no doubt now that such inheritance occurs. The only question I think now is how much of that happens, how much of development in evolutionary terms that corresponds to, but those are empirical questions they'll get answered. They're open questions, not closed in the way the Neo Darwin synthesis liked to think.

So, I think the problem lies with the dogmatism of the other side. If you ask any people involved in the third way, particularly somebody like Jim Shapiro, do we already know what needs to be known? The answer would be, I think, yes. We already know that the simplistic view, gene-centric view of neo-Darwinism must be incorrect. Still, we're open to what further experimentation will show about what's the relevant and relative significance of epigenetic changes, epigenetic inheritance, and the way in which organisms can respond meaningfully to the environmental challenges. All those are open questions. It seems to me that if anybody scoffs at those who go one side or the other, it's the people who are dogmatic. The viceman barrier is a dogman. The central dogma of molecular biology is a dogma. There are no rule dogmas in science. That's to misunderstand the nature of science. So, I think the scoffing is the other way around.

Adam Jacobs: Right. That's what it seems to me. I just wanted to get your feedback on that. We're so far in very close agreement. Do you think that more people should learn about the third way and educate themselves about really what contemporary evolution is about?

Dennis Noble: Well, that's what I'm devoted to at the moment. I switched my career around 20 years ago now in 2004. I retired from leading a major research team working on the heart and the rhythm of the heart and its arrhythmias and so on, and I did that as a change. In 2004, I decided deliberately to write my first book in relation to evolution, which was The Music of Life, pointing out, first of all, that metaphorically speaking, the selfish gene theory is a tautology. It can be cooperative or selfish. It doesn't matter which one of the key features that tell you you've probably got taught a logical theory is that it doesn't matter whether you choose between two opposite interpretations of it.

If that is the case, it must be necessarily true. Now, the central dogma is also in that category; Crick formulated it, and the height of triumph over what were very important molecular biological discoveries in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, the demonstration that the DNA exists as a double helix, that it can at least partly self replicate, but not enough to be accurate. That's a very important point, and development led to a very simplistic interpretation of the central document of molecular biology. It's actually a very simple chemical fact. DNA can be a template to make RNA, which can be a template to make proteins. That's all it says.

One small addition is that it cannot go the other way. From sequence to define or to produce a DNA sequence, but the organism doesn't need to do that in order to change its genes. It doesn't do it from a single protein. It doesn't take a protein sequence and say, can I make a sequence, which is now a new piece of DNA doesn't do that at all. What it does, and the immune system is a very good example of this. During the pandemic, a new virus arrived, and the immune system immediately detected that it did not have an immunoglobulin that would neutralize that virus.

Its shape wasn't correct for grabbing the virus virus and neutralizing it. What did it, and I'm anthropomorphizing this, it told its B cells, T cells, the immune system cells that can change their genomes to change the genome as much as possible so that you get maybe a million cells with different sequences for just the part, the grabbing part of the immunoglobulin. That's a very tiny region of the genome, much less than not 0.01%, very tiny, but targeted at just that region. Please mutate. And then the system finds out out of maybe a million different kinds of immunoglobulin produced, which one fits

Once protected, which fits the message, goes back to those cells, please reproduce. The others are allowed to be recycled. It's very simple, but it was occurring during the pandemic. We were changing our genomes during the pandemic, and the central document of molecular biology says nothing about that at all. So I think the problem is that the dogmatic attitudes are actually on the other side in the Neo Darwinist camp, and I also think there are many interpretations of what's called modern synthesis. I don't want to get into a technical discussion of what you should call it, why, and so on. But what is clear is that there's no room for dogmatism in science.

The Weissman barrier was a dogma. The central dogma of molecular biology was a dogma actually called a dogma, and the idea that DNA could self replicate accurately is also a dogma. All those three dogmas have now been shown to be incorrect. So I think it's very simple. My attitude to this is it's up to the other side now to respond to the failure of those three so-called dogmas. Was Richard Dawkins able to do that? Anybody can watch the discussion between the two of us in 2022. It's all over the internet now, and you'll find that he does not answer a single one of my careful explanations of the molecular, biological reasons why those dogmas are incorrect.

Adam Jacobs: I have seen that, but I'm going to watch it again with this new understanding in mind and refresh myself on it. But yeah, I think your description seems exactly correct. That's what I've suspected for some time. It's hard not to note the inflexibility, which does not seem like a scientific attitude, as you said,

Dennis Noble: Ordinary. I mean, as I said earlier on, the scoffing should be the other way. I don't, though, you see, I think as scientists, and I've seen it so often, I've had a long career in science, over 65 years of doing research, and people are easily misled by the language they use.

One of my articles in 2021 is called the Illusions of the Modern Synthesis. People, of course, have bridled a bit at me, calling them illusions, but they are linguistic illusions, particularly when you talk about a dogma like the viceman barrier or the central dogma of vernacular biology, biology that should never have been done. It should be open to experimentation to determine to what extent a barrier is absolute or partial. The barrier between the SOR and the germ land is partial. Things can go through it. It's been shown that things go through it. The central dogma it forbids going from a protein sequence to a DNA sequence, but that doesn't stop the organism from going into its genomes and saying, please change this part of the genome, and we'll then select which works. So all of these documents, I'm afraid, have already been deconstructed. I think, in many ways, once people understand that argument, they will see that the shift has already occurred.

Adam Jacobs: This is very edifying for me, by the way. So I wanted to thank you for all the excellent information. I have time for two questions. One more on biology, if it's okay, an evolution, and then I'd like to ask a broader sort of philosophical question.

Okay. So the first one is for a layman like myself. Considering the evolutionary process, it seems to me that organisms like pine trees and mosquitoes are very good at reproduction, maintaining their communities, and so on and so forth. It also seems to me that human beings are not nearly as good at it, meaning that the complexities that we have and our emotions lead to all kinds of anti-evolutionary developments. So the phenomenon of suicide, for instance, or the priesthood where someone takes themselves voluntarily out of the gene pool or our wars, so many factors that we have developed that are hurting this species as opposed to selecting positive behaviors and traits, even the obesity epidemic that exists, at least in America, how do we explain that? Why do mosquitoes just keep producing good mosquitoes? And we seem to be devolving in certain ways,

Dennis Noble: Of course, because we're subject to cultural evolution to a degree that those organisms are not. Once you've got cultural evolution, then it's open, and people will be subject to what society makes of you, which is going to produce. As you say, the emotional reactions don't like this situation. I almost feel like killing myself. I mean, if you don't understand that, you're not going to think that you should kill yourself. I'd like to quote Tolstoy in Anna Karina, his character there. One of the male characters actually says, if I don't know why I am here and what my purpose is, I can't live. Tolstoy put it beautifully, but that's a cultural thing, and humans have that cultural thing to a degree that very few other organisms have. Of course, we can see echoes of all of this in the other apes and similar; I've forgotten the word I want for the general class, as it were…

Adam Jacobs: Simian

Dennis Noble: That's right. Yes, exactly. So yes, it is a gradation and the organisms that have this, you might think the strange ability to be subject to the culture of the society in which they live have this problem, and they have it to the degree that depends on the degree to which they have it. So I think it's easy to understand why we humans are a bit queer, but I know that's got other meanings too. Anyway, a bit odd in all of this, but it does seem to me to be true.

Adam Jacobs: Interesting. Okay, so there are two kinds of evolution afoot. There's the biological one, and then there's a cultural one. Although it seems that the cultural one could not necessarily be beneficial in the same way that the biological one is.

Dennis Noble: In the long run, it will be, of course, because, unfortunately, if people die because of their beliefs, they won't procreate very much, so I see. Incidentally, I see natural selection, which is what we're talking about there, whether people die or not, and then what's passed on to the next generations by chance. I see that as a kind of background process. I don't think it's the real driver, though, and once you've got organisms that have intentionality, they are the drivers.

Adam Jacobs: Interesting,

Dennis Noble: And as a species, it's quite possible that we will create the conditions in which we can no longer survive as a species is as serious as it's

Adam Jacobs: For my final question, as you said, you've been working in science for 65 years, which is a remarkable amount of time, and at the highest levels, you've come to certain conclusions. If I asked you to summarize your spiritual beliefs based on your scientific discoveries, what have you come to at the moment? What do you think the nature in an ultimate sense of reality is?

Dennis Noble: Well, first of all, I have no problem using the word spiritual. I think we have to, and incidentally, I'm not alone in this as a biologist, the great originator of the idea of epigenetics. Conrad Waddington, in the 1950s, he wrote a book called The Strategy of the Genes in 1957, recently reprinted incidentally, but he freely used the word spirituality, and he did so explicitly by saying, this does not, for me, have a particular religious connotation.

I am with Waddington on the fact that we do have a spiritual existence. It comes from the fact that we're cultural organisms in a society that is developing our cultural ideas. Those are open and very much a society matter, not an individual matter. Still, then they go a little bit further, which is to say that the very existence of intentionality means that we are to a large extent in control, not the other way round. We are not the plaing of genes in a film based on some discussions with traditional Korean Buddhist monks a few years ago, I simply said at the end of the filming, genes did not make us selfish. We do when we do now, that incidentally, that idea of intentionality being part of the driver of evolution is itself not a new idea by a long chalk.

Charles Darwin, in his 1871 book written incidentally in reaction to the so-called Neo Darwinist Wallace made it very clear that he thought that various species, including the human, of course, that's artificial selection, intentional selection by us and sexual selection is a very similar process, the ability of organisms to choose who they meet with. Still, you can readily extend that to what I would call social selection, in which case you're back into the point that it's a cultural evolution as well as a physical process. So I don't hesitate to use the word spiritual to refer to all of that just as Waddington did all of those years ago.

Now, if people want to go further with that and say, well, that is also what leads me to particular religious beliefs, that's fine. I have no problem with people wishing to do that. Still, they have to recognize that they're then making a metaphysical statement in addition to a scientific one that clarifies, as best I can, what my own position is.

Adam Jacobs: Thank you, and thank you for taking the time to talk with me. It was really a pleasure to have this conversation, and I do recommend that people go out and read your books. Plenty of videos, like you mentioned, are online right now, but are you working on something new that we should be waiting for? Oh, oh yeah. What's the next project coming out?

Dennis Noble: Well, I have a book which is going to come out probably a little bit later this year. I will explain how I came while working on the heart from a reductionist viewpoint to a systems open viewpoint. It'll be a semi-autobiographical account of how, doing even very strict mathematical reconstructions of organisms, which is what I was doing in the heart and in other organs of the body, I've come to see the principle of biological relativity. I did not know that in 1960, when they first built a mathematical model of the rhythm of the heart, but I've been forced by my own work to come to a systems view and, therefore, to the principle of biological relativity. So that book will deal with that. It will also have a final chapter that answers Richard Dawkins's latest book, the Genetic Book of the Dead, because I'm afraid he has once again ignored the main points in that debate in 2022.

Adam Jacobs: Well, I am very much looking forward to reading that, and once again, thank you so much for taking the time. It was really a pleasure.

Dennis Noble: My pleasure, too. Thank you.

Adam Jacobs: Okay. Have a good evening.