Literature/202503032118 the music of life

• Source: [@noble2008The music of life: biology beyond genes]
• Tags: #biology #systems #systems-biology

It is a fantastic read, centered at explaining what systems biology means. Noble (this is not my field, so I am unsure) was perhaps the first to introduce the concept of systems to biology. It all starts with the idea of simulating the behavior of the heart (early times of computers) and realizing that, numerically, there was no periodicity: how could the heart beat?

That lead the author to a broader realization, identifying that the complexity of biology arises from the interactions and not simply for an encoded, bottom up, approach. Believing that the genome contains all the information we need may be misinterpreting the role that the genome has for biology.

Genes are only a part of the picture, where the rest is driven by how genes interact with each other (or at least how the products they encode for interact with each other).

There's a comment in the book that was particularly interesting: as cells speciate, they all have the same genetic material. Therefore, the complexity of an organism has to appear not just from the genes themselves, but by an effect of the environment. Interestingly, if you pick a cell from a specific tissue, the daughter cells (at least for some generations) will inherit the properties of the mother cell.

That means many things, on the one hand, that environment is the one that triggers speciation (somehow) and on the other, that Lamarck was not so wrong after all. If the environment creates inherited changes, then it's not Darwinian selection, and the genetic code has not changed.

The book uses the metaphor of an organ player, the tubes, etc. which is a bit annoying, but at some point you get the gist (maybe).

Another interesting discussion is the fact that we can look at genes interacting and not just at mutations in the genome. For example, genes encoding 100 proteins, interacting in groups of 5, gives raise to around 75 million combinations. If we assume that no single gene is responsible for a single phenotype, but that groups of genes result in one (and with genes working on more than one phenotype), we should start looking at the combinatorial space, which is much, much larger than the genetic space itself.

It is complex, no doubts, and a way of thinking that's very different from what I was used to. The book tries very hard not to antagonize with "the selfish gene", and it even tries to justify that Dawkins may have been misinterpreted in many ways. In any case, it shed light into a topics that was completely alien to me, and that made me realize how little I knew about biology, the challenges, and the way of thinking forward.

Tags: #reading #reading-2025