Noble was educated atEmanuel School andUniversity College London (UCL).[2][4] In 1958 he began his investigations into the mechanisms of heartbeat. This led to two seminal papers inNature in 1960[10][11] giving the first experimentally-based mathematical simulation of the electrical rhythm of the heart,[12] extensively developed withRichard Tsien in 1975,[13] and withDario DiFrancesco in 1985.[14] All three articles form the foundations of modern electrophysiology of the heart. The 1985 article was included in 2015 in the Royal Society's 350 year celebration of the publication ofPhilosophical Transactions.[15]
From this work it became clear that there was not a single oscillator which controlled heartbeat, but rather this was anemergent property of the feedback loops involving the various ion channels. In 1961 he obtained hisPhD working under the supervision ofOtto Hutter at UCL.[16][17]
Noble's research focuses on usingcomputer models ofbiological organs and organ systems to interpret function from the molecular level to the whole organism. Together with international collaborators, his team has used supercomputers to create the first virtual organ, the virtual heart.[18][19]
As secretary-general of the International Union of Physiological Sciences 1993–2001, he played a major role, together with Peter Hunter, in launching thePhysiome Project, an international project to use computer simulations to create the quantitative physiological models necessary to interpret thegenome, and he was elected president of the IUPS at its world congress inKyoto in 2009.[20]
Noble is also a philosopher of biology, with many publications in journals and books of philosophy.[21][22][23]
His booksThe Music of Life,Dance to the Tune of Life andUnderstanding Living Systems challenge the foundations of current biological sciences, question the central dogma, its unidirectional view of information flow, and its imposition of a bottom-up methodology for research in the life sciences[24]
His 2006 bookThe Music of Life examines some of the basic aspects of systems biology, and is critical of the ideas ofgenetic determinism and geneticreductionism. He points out that there are many examples offeedback loops and "downward causation" in biology, and that it is not reasonable to privilege one level of understanding over all others. He also explains thatgenes in fact work in groups and systems, so that the genome is more like a set of organ pipes than a "blueprint for life". His 2016 bookDance to the Tune of Life sets these ideas out in a broad sweep from the general principle of relativity applied to biology, through to the role of purpose in evolution and to the relativity of epistemology.[citation needed]
He contrastsRichard Dawkins's famous statement inThe Selfish Gene ("Now they [genes] swarm ... safe inside gigantic lumbering robots ... they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence") with an alternative view: "Now they [genes] are trapped in huge colonies, locked inside highly intelligent beings, moulded by the outside world, communicating with it by complex processes, through which, blindly, as if by magic, function emerges. They are in you and me; we are the system that allows their code to be read; and their preservation is totally dependent on the joy we experience in reproducing ourselves. We are the ultimate rationale for their existence". He then suggests that there is no empirical difference between these statements, and says that they differ in "metaphor" and "sociological or polemical viewpoint".[25]
He argues that "the paradigms for genetic causality in biological systems are seriously confused" and that "The metaphors that served us well during the molecular biological phase of recent decades have limited or even misleading impacts in the multilevel world of systems biology. New paradigms are needed if we are to succeed in unravelling multifactorial genetic causation at higher levels of physiological function and so to explain the phenomena that genetics was originally about."[26]
Noble andJames A. Shapiro established The Third Way of Evolution (TWE) project in 2014. The TWE which is also known as the "Integrated Synthesis" shares many similarities with the extended evolutionary synthesis but is more radical in its claims.[9] The TWE consists of a group of researchers who provide a "Third Way" alternative tocreationism and the modern synthesis. The TWE predicts that the modern synthesis will be replaced with an entirely new evolutionary framework. Similar to the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES), advocates cite examples ofdevelopmental bias,genetic assimilation,niche construction, non-genetic inheritance,phenotypic plasticity and other evolutionary processes.[9] Shapiro'snatural genetic engineering, a process described to account for novelty created in biological evolution is also important for the TWE.[33][34][35] The difference between the extended synthesis and the TWE is that the latter calls for an entire replacement of the modern synthesis rather than an extension.[9]
In 2023, evolutionary biologist Erik Svensson commented that "to date, there are few leading evolutionary biologists who have openly embraced the TWE" and it is unlikely that an entire replacement of the modern synthesis will occur as there has been little visibility of such a forthcomingparadigm shift during the past decade.[9]
Jack, J. J. B.; Noble, Denis; Tsien, R. W. (1975).Electric Current Flow in Excitable Cells. Oxford: Clarendon Press.ISBN978-0-19-857365-4.OCLC1633990.
Noble, Denis; Powell, Trevor (1987).Electrophysiology of Single Cardiac Cells. London: Academic Press.ISBN978-0-12-520040-0.OCLC20692607.
Montefiore, Alan; Noble, Denis, eds. (2023). "Scientific Introduction," "Intentional Action and Physiology," and "What do Intentions do?".Goals, No Goals and Own Goals: A Debate on Goal-Directed and Intentional Behaviour. London: Routledge.doi:10.4324/978100318555.ISBN978-1-000-41499-8.OCLC1420169188.
Boyd, C. A. R.; Noble, Denis (1993).The Logic of life : the challenge of integrative physiology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-262417-8.OCLC27975536.
The Selected Papers of Denis Noble CBE FRS: A Journey in Physiology Towards Enlightenment. London, Singapore: Imperial College Press ; Distributed by World Scientific Publishing. 2012.ISBN978-1-84816-842-8.OCLC769546978.
Edelstein, Larry; Smythies, John R.; Quesenberry, Peter J.; Noble, Denis; et al., eds. (2019). "Exomes, gemmuls, pangenesis and Darwin".Exosomes: a Clinical Compendium. San Diego: Elsevier Science & Technology.ISBN978-0-12-816054-1.OCLC1127115445.Partial preview from Google Books.
Rattigan, Benedict; Noble, Denis; et al., eds. (2023). "The Interdependence of Order and Disorder: How Complexity Arises in the Living and the Inanimate Universe".The Language of Symmetry. Boca Raton: CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group.ISBN978-1-003-30698-6.OCLC1350435643.Partial preview from Google Books.
Noble, Raymond; Noble, Denis (2023).Understanding Living Systems. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.ISBN978-1-009-27739-6.OCLC1378603076.
Noble, Denis; Noble, Raymond (2023). "How Purposive Agency Became Banned from Evolutionary Biology". In Corning, Peter A.; Kauffman, Stuart A.; Noble, Denis; et al. (eds.).Evolution "On Purpose": Teleonomy in Living Systems. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.ISBN978-0-262-37601-3.OCLC1348644515.Partial preview from Google Books.
His major invited lectures include the Darwin Lecture for theBritish Association in 1966,[60] the Nahum Lecture atYale in 1977 and the Ueda lecture atTokyo University in 1985 and 1990. He was President of the Medical Section of theBritish Science Association 1991–92. Many further invited lectures during his election as Secretary-General (1993-2001) and President (2009-2017) ofIUPS.
In 1979 he was elected a Fellow of theRoyal Society. His nomination for the Royal Society reads:
Distinguished for the discovery ofslowly activated potassium currents in the heart and a quantitative analysis of their role in controllingrepolarization and pacemaker activity; the discovery of theionic mechanisms by whichadrenaline increasesheart rate. He has shown that therapeutic levels ofcardiac glycosides may increase, rather than decrease,potassium gradients in the heart, and has published an analytical treatment ofmembrane excitation theory and cable theory that provides a modern basis for the concepts of safety factor, liminal length, excitation time constants and the phenomenon of repetitive firing.[3]
Noble was born in London in 1936 to working-class tailors, George and Ethel Noble.[67]
He plays classical guitar and singsOccitan troubadour and folk songs (Oxford Trobadors[68]). In addition to English, he has lectured in French, Italian, Performance with Nadau & Peiraguda Occitan,[69][70] Japanese and Korean.[71]
^Ten Tusscher, K. H. W. J. (2003). "A model for human ventricular tissue".AJP: Heart and Circulatory Physiology.286 (4):H1573 –H1589.doi:10.1152/ajpheart.00794.2003.PMID14656705.
^DiFrancesco, Dario; Noble, Denis (2022). "A model of cardiac electrical activity incorporating ionic pumps and concentration changes".Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.307 (1133):353–398.doi:10.1098/rstb.1985.0001.PMID2578676.
^Noble, Denis (1993). "The logic of life: the public perception of science and its threat to the values of society".Science and Public Policy.doi:10.1093/spp/20.3.187.
^Shapiro J, Noble D (2021). "What prevents mainstream evolutionists teaching the whole truth about how genomes evolve?".Prog Biophys Mol Biol.165:140–152.doi:10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2021.04.004.PMID33933502.
