Denis Noble: “Neo-Darwinism is dead”

Professor of Biology Denis Noble, best known for creating the first mathematical model of a beating cardiac cell, proposes a profound shift in how we understand life. In this conversation with Hans Busstra, he challenges the long-standing central dogma of Neo-Darwinism: the notion of one-way causation from DNA to cell to organism, with genes positioned as the ultimate governors of biology. Instead, Noble proposes a theory of ‘biological relativity’: no single level—genes, cells, organs, or the whole organism—has privileged causal authority. Causation flows both upward and downward. Physiological states influence cellular processes, which in turn can reshape the genome. Agency is distributed across levels of biological organisation, and the genome is not a dictatorial blueprint but an interactive participant. Far from rejecting Darwin, Noble sees this as returning to Darwin’s own intuition that evolution requires mechanisms far richer than blind chance. Understanding those mechanisms, he argues, is the next Einsteinian step in biology.