Articles & books on Evolution 

Updated 11 November 2024 

With direct links embedded in the titles

Total publications: over 50

Total Citations to evolutionary biology publications: over 4000

Articles arranged roughly in order of citation scores — highest first

BOOKS

biology. 

2006: The Music of Life: biology beyond genes.

(Denis Noble)

This is the first book in which Denis Noble challenged orthodox evolutionary biology. It asks whether any biological experiment could test whether Selfish Gene Theory or a theory using opposing metaphors is correct. That challenge has existed for nearly two decades. No-one has proposed an experiment that could distinguish between the two opposing ideas. Selfish Gene theory is not empirical science. 

2016: Dance to the tune of life: Biological relativity.

(Denis Noble)

This is the book that outlines the principle of Biological Relativity, working all the way through relativity theories in physics, to how cells, systems and organisms work, through to why a relativity theory of evolutionary biology is incompatible with orthodox theory. 

2023: Understanding Living Systems.

(R Noble & D Noble)

This book re-establishes the role of choice and freedom in biology, after 100 years of being ignored and sidelined. These qualities are not merely characteristics of life, or “epiphenomena”. They are the very signature of life. It cannot be understood any other way. (Review on Amazon)

1993: The logic of life: the challenge of integrative physiology.

(Denis Noble)

Book published by OUP for the 1993 International Congress of Physiological Sciences. Hidden in this book were the first signs of Denis Noble venturing into publishing on evolution.

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ARTICLES

2012: A Theory of Biological relativity: no privileged level of causation.

(Denis Noble)

This is the original formulation of the principle of Biological Relativity. It shows that downward causation is a necessity in multi-level living systems since the boundary conditions (forming downward causation) are necessary for any upward (reductive) causation to be possible. 

2008: Genes and Causation.

(Denis Noble)

The metaphors developed during the molecular biological phase of recent decades have limited 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. Because it can solve the ‘genetic differential effect problem’, modelling of biological function has an essential role to play in unravelling genetic causation.

2015: Evolution beyond neo-Darwinism: a new conceptual framework.

(Denis Noble)

Examines the conceptual framework of neo-Darwinism, including the concepts of ‘gene’, ‘selfish’, ‘code’, ‘program’, ‘blueprint’, ‘book of life’, ‘replicator’ and ‘vehicle’. This form of representation is a barrier to extending or replacing existing theory as it confuses conceptual and empirical matters. These need to be clearly distinguished. In the case of the central concept of ‘gene’, the definition has moved all the way from describing a necessary cause (defined in terms of the inheritable phenotype itself) to an empirically testable hypothesis (in terms of causation by DNA sequences). In multi-way networks of interactions there can be no privileged cause.

2013: Physiology is rocking the foundations of evolutionary biology.

(Denis Noble)

Genetic change is far from random and often not gradual. Molecular genetics and genome sequencing have deconstructed this unnecessarily restrictive view of evolution in a way that reintroduces physiological function and interactions with the environment as factors influencing the speed and nature of inherited change. Acquired characteristics can be inherited, and in a few but growing number of cases that inheritance has now been shown to be robust for many generations. The 21st century can look forward to a new synthesis that will reintegrate physiology with evolutionary biology.

2015: Conrad Waddington and the origin of epigenetics.

(Denis Noble)

In 1956, the British developmental biologist, Conrad Waddington, published a paper in the journal Evolution (Waddington, 1956) in which he succeeded in demonstrating the inheritance of a characteristic acquired in a population in response to an environmental stimulus.He used the word ‘canalised’ for this kind of persuasion since he represented the developmental process as a series of ‘decisions’ that could be represented as ‘valleys’ and ‘forks’ in a developmental landscape. This work was the beginning of epigenetics. He used the word ‘canalised’ for this kind of persuasion since he represented the developmental process as a series of ‘decisions’ that could be represented as ‘valleys’ and ‘forks’ in a developmental landscape

2014: Evolution evolves: physiology returns to centre stage.

(Noble, Jablonka, Joyner, Mueller, Omholt)

Editorial for a Special issue of the Journal of Physiology. The questions addressed in the papers published here include the following: What are the major new developments in evolutionary biology and how do they challenge the Modern Synthesis? Which of these developments have implications for how the physiological sciences should further their understanding of health and disease? If the Modern Synthesis is to be extended or replaced by a new explanatory structure, what is the role of physiology in the development of this structure?

2011: Neo‐Darwinism, the Modern Synthesis and selfish genes: are they of use in physiology? 

(Denis Noble)

Gene-centric interpretations of evolution, and more particularly the selfish gene expression of those interpretations, form barriers to the integration of physiological science with evolutionary theory. A gene-centred approach analyses the relationships between genotypes and phenotypes in terms of differences (change the genotype and observe changes in phenotype). We now know that, most frequently, this does not correctly reveal the relationships because of extensive buffering by robust networks of interactions.

2012: Top-down causation: an integrating theme within and across the sciences?

(Ellis, Noble, O’Connor)

Introduction to the journal issue where the principle of Biological Relativity was first formulated. 

2017: Evolution viewed from physics, physiology and medicine.

(Denis Noble)

Stochasticity is harnessed by organisms to generate functionality. Randomness does not, therefore, necessarily imply lack of function or ‘blind chance’ at higher levels. In this respect, biology must resemble physics in generating order from disorder. This fact is contrary to Schrödinger’s idea of biology generating phenotypic order from molecular-level order, which inspired the central dogma of molecular biology.

2019: Biological relativity requires circular causality but not symmetry of causation

(R. Noble, K.Tasaki, PJ Noble D.Noble)

The principle of Biological Relativity requires circular causality between levels of organization. But the forms of causality are also necessarily different. They contribute in asymmetric ways. Upward causation can be represented by the differential or similar equations describing the mechanics of lower level processes. Downward causation is then best represented as determining initial and boundary conditions. The questions tackled in this article are: (1) where and when do these boundaries exist? and (2) how do they convey the influences between levels? We show that not all boundary conditions arise from higher-level organization.

2021: The illusions of the modern synthesis.

(Denis Noble)

This article examines the language of the Modern Synthesis and reveals that it is based on four important misinterpretations of what molecular biology had shown, so forming the basis of the four Illusions: 1. Natural Selection; 2. The Weismann Barrier; 3. The Rejection of Darwin’s Gemmules; 4. The Central Dogma. A multi-level organisation view of biology avoids these illusions through the principle of Biological Relativity. Molecular biology does not therefore confirm the assumptions of the Modern Synthesis.

2018: Harnessing stochasticity: How do organisms make choices? 

(R Noble & D Noble)

Choice in the behavior of organisms involves novelty, which may be unpredictable. Yet in retrospect, we can usually provide a rationale for the choice. A deterministic view of life cannot explain this. The solution to this paradox is that organisms can harness stochasticity through which they can generate many possible solutions to environmental challenges. Harnessing stochastic and/or chaotic processes is essential to the ability of organisms to have agency and to make choices.

2011: Differential and integral views of genetics in computational systems biology.

(Denis Noble) 

The differential (gene-centric) view is incomplete in a sense analogous to using differentiation without integration in mathematics. Differences in genotype are frequently not reflected in significant differences in phenotype as they are buffered by networks of molecular interactions capable of substituting an alternative pathway to achieve a given phenotype characteristic when one pathway is removed. Those networks integrate the influences of many genes on each phenotype so that the effect of a modification in DNA depends on the context in which it occurs.

2017: Was the watchmaker blind? Or was she one-eyed?

(R Noble & D Noble)

The question whether evolution is blind is usually presented as a choice between no goals at all (‘the blind watchmaker’) and long-term goals which would be external to the organism, for example in the form of special creation or intelligent design. The arguments either way do not address the question whether there are short-term goals within rather than external to organisms. Organisms and their interacting populations have evolved mechanisms by which they can harness blind stochasticity and so generate rapid functional responses to environmental challenges.

2018: Central dogma or central debate? 

(Denis Noble)

The Central Dogma of molecular biology has been widely misinterpreted to be a modern version of the Weismann Barrier. This confuses cellular-level inheritance with DNA inheritance and is therefore incorrect. The consequences for biology generally and for physiology in particular are profound. Removing the confusion completely alters our understanding of the relationship between physiology and evolutionary biology. The Weismann Barrier is permeable, and organisms are capable of transmitting non-DNA inheritance.

2013: A biological relativity view of the relationships between genomes and phenotypes.

(Denis Noble)

This article explores the relativistic principle that there is no privileged scale of causality in biology to clarify the relationships between genomes and phenotypes. The idea that genetic causes are primary views the genome as a program. Initially, that view was vindicated by the discovery of mutations and knockouts that have large and specific effects on the phenotype. But we now know that these form the minority of cases. Many changes at the genome level are buffered by robust networks of interactions in cells, tissues and organs.

2021: What prevents mainstream evolutionists teaching the whole truth about how genomes evolve?

(Shapiro & Noble)

The common belief that the neo-Darwinian Modern Synthesis (MS) was buttressed by the discoveries of molecular biology is incorrect. On the contrary, those discoveries have undermined the MS. This article discusses the many processes revealed by molecular studies and genome sequencing that contribute to evolution but nonetheless lie beyond the strict confines of the MS formulated in the 1940s

2017: New trends in evolutionary biology:  biological, philosophical and social science perspectives.

(Bateson, Cartwright, Dupre & Laland)

Introduction to Special Issue of Interface Focus publishing articles based on presentations to a joint Discussion Meeting of the British Academy and the Royal Society held at Carlton House Terrace (The Royal Society) on 7–9 November 2016. 

2021: The role of stochasticity in biological communication processes.

(Denis Noble)

Stochastic processes at molecular, cellular and higher levels in organisms are not simply noise. Organisms also use stochasticity at all levels to generate new DNA sequences, as in the immune system, and new forms of behaviour, as in the nervous system. The harnessing of stochasticity therefore endows organisms with the means to actively influence the direction of their development and evolution.

2019: Systemic integration of inheritance systems.

(Jablonka & Noble)

The between-generations transmission of phenotypic variations is based on networks operating at different levels–genetic, epigenetic, behavioral and symbolic. Since each level involves a network of interactions, integrating such networks of networks may seem hopelessly complex. We suggest that the problem can be drastically simplified if analysis starts from a description of the heritable trait of interest as an attractor in a developmental landscape constructed by networks of inputs at underlying and overlying levels of organization

2021: Can reasons and values influence action: how might intentional agency work physiologically? 

(R Noble & D Noble)

In this paper, we demonstrate (1) how harnessing stochasticity can be the basis of creative agency; (2) that such harnessing can resolve the apparent conflict between reductionist (micro-level) accounts of behaviour and behaviour as the outcome of rational and value-driven (macro-level) decisions; (3) how neurophysiological processes can instantiate such behaviour; (4) The processes involved depend on three features of living organisms: (a) they are necessarily open systems; (b) micro-level systems therefore nest within higher-level systems; (c) causal interactions must occur across all the boundaries between the levels of organization.

2005: Genome size and numbers of biological functions.

(Feytmans, Noble & Peitsch)

Calculations of potential numbers of interactions between gene products to generate physiological functions show a highly non-linear relation between genome size and functional complexity. Moreover, very small differences in gene numbers or sequence can translate into very large differences in functionality.

2023: Physiology restores purpose to evolutionary biology.

(R Noble & D Noble)

Life is purposefully creative in a continuous process of maintaining integrity; it adapts to counteract change. This is an ongoing, iterative process. Its actions are essentially directed to this purpose. Life exists to exist. Physiology is the study of purposeful living function. Function necessarily implies purpose. Examples are given where purpose enables prediction of lower-level processes. The reverse is rarely correct. Purpose cannot be identified at molecular levels. 

2019: Exosomes, gemmules, pangenesis and Darwin.

(Denis Noble)

Charles Darwin accepted Lamarck’s ideas on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. He also developed a theory for the mechanism by which changes in the soma might be transmitted to the germline cells, sperm and eggs. He supposed that tiny particles, called gemmules, can move through the body, presumably via the body fluids. To all intents and purposes he was proposing a theory of particle transmission between cells that resembles the exosomes discovered in our time. Exosomes are involved in transgenerational epigenetics, which would help to explain many observed maternal and paternal transgenerational effects in health and disease. This article may have been the first to reinterpret Darwin’s theory of pangenesis in terms of modern physiology.

2020: How to link genomics to physiology through epigenomics.

(Noble & Hunter)

Genome wide sequencing has been spectacularly successful in our understanding of evolutionary biology, for example, in showing widespread lateral transfer of DNA even between different species, the extensive contribution of viral DNA to genomes and the tree diagrams of human evolution. By contrast, the results for healthcare have been disappointing. Physiome modelling of physiological control networks could both explain these disappointing outcomes and point the way forward in understand disease and its treatment.

2023: Evolution” on Purpose”: Teleonomy in Living Systems.

(Corning, Kauffman, Noble, Shapiro & Vane-Wright)

Evolution “On Purpose” puts forward a more inclusive theoretical synthesis that goes far beyond the underlying principles and assumptions of the modern synthesis to accommodate work since the 1950s in molecular genetics, developmental biology, epigenetic inheritance, genomics, multilevel selection, niche construction, physiology, behavior, biosemiotics, chemical reaction theory, and many other fields

2022: How the Hodgkin Cycle became the principle of biological relativity.

(Denis Noble)

One of the origins of the principle of Biological Relativity is the Hodgkin Cycle, the dependence of protein activity on membrane potentials, which is fundamentally different from metabolic cycles. Causation upwards and downwards is simultaneous in voltage-dependent processes. 

2020: Charles Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and 21st century arguments on the fundamentals of biology. 

(Denis Noble)

Editorial: This volume of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology publishes an article by Peter Corning on “Beyond the Modern Synthesis: a framework for a more inclusive biological synthesis” (Corning, 2020). Corning challenges some of the key assumptions of 20th century biology, by implication asking whether they are any longer relevant to the discoveries of the 21st century. He also proposes an alternative paradigm.

2021: Cellular Darwinism: Regulatory networks, stochasticity and selection in cancer development.

(Denis Noble)

There are strong parallels between the evolutionary origin of species within populations of organisms and new concepts for the origin of cancers within cell populations in the tissues of the body. The analogy is that cancers can be regarded as a new somatic species developing within the host organism. In both cases, understanding the processes involved requires a multi-scale analysis, including higher-level control of genetic and epigenetic changes.

2022: Modern physiology vindicates Darwin’s dream.

(Denis Noble)

Charles Darwin spent the last decade of his life collaborating with physiologists in search of  biological processes of evolution to complement Natural Selection. He viewed physiology as the way forward in answering fundamental questions about inheritance, acquired characteristics, and the mechanisms by which organisms could achieve their ends and survival. He collaborated with 19th century physiologists, notably John Burdon-Sanderson and George Romanes, in his search for the mechanisms of transgenerational inheritance.

2021: What future for evolutionary biology?

(Denis Noble)

We have reached a critical turning point in evolutionary biology and it is high time for a major repair initiative……Physiology is the way forward in following up the demise of the Weismann Barrier. Indeed it is already doing so in extensive research over many years on trans-generational maternal and paternal effects and on the molecular and other processes by which they occur.

2021: Rehabilitation of Karl Popper’s ideas on evolutionary biology and the nature of biological science.

(D Noble & R Noble)

Karl Popper’s ideas on evolution in his 1986 Medawar lecture were remarkably close to Charles Darwin’s original distinction between artificial and natural selection, but at odds with the Modern Synthesis in giving an active role to organisms in the process of evolution. His ideas were also compatible with recent work showing the role of the harnessing of stochasticity in enabling this active agency. He also argued against the reduction of biology to chemistry.

2018: Is the whole different from the sum of its parts?  A proposed procedure for measuring divergence from additivity.

(Noble, Neuman & Cohen)

Conceptualizing and measuring the extent and the way in which a whole is different from the sum of its parts is a non-trivial challenge. One possible direction for addressing this challenge involves measuring the extent in which the entropy of the whole is non-additive, meaning different from the sum of the entropy of its parts. However, measuring divergence from additivity is far from trivial. In this short paper, we propose a simple procedure for measuring divergence from additivity and illustrate the procedure by analysing the behaviour of a soccer team.

2017: Digital and analogue information in organisms.

(Denis Noble)

Are organisms encoded as purely digital molecular descriptions in their gene sequences? By analysing the genome alone, could we then solve the forward problem of computing the behaviour of the system from this information? I argue that the first is incorrect and that the second is impossible. We therefore need to replace the gene-centric digital view of the relation between genotype and phenotype with an integrative view that also recognises the importance of analogue information in organisms and its contribution to inheritance across generations. Nature and nurture must interact. Either on its own can do nothing.

2023: How purposive agency became banned from evolutionary biology.

(D Noble & R Noble)

Purposive “agency” featured strongly in the nineteenth-century ideas on evolution of Charles Darwin. It was removed by the neo-Darwinians, Alfred Russel Wallace and August Weismann. The modern synthesis of evolutionary biology, as it was originally formulated by Julian Huxley in 1942, incorporated the ideas of Wallace and Weismann, but nevertheless included a wide range of evolutionary processes. The scope of the modern synthesis became vastly reduced during its simplification in the 1960s and 1970s. In this paper we identify the main historical developments leading to these outcomes. We also summarize the utility and predictive ability as reasons for which purposive agency should to be restored in the study of living organisms.

2024: It’s time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life.

(Denis Noble)

When the human genome was sequenced in 2001, many thought that it would prove to be an ‘instruction manual’ for life. But the genome turned out to be no blueprint. In fact, most genes don’t have a pre-set function that can be determined from their DNA sequence. Instead, genes’ activity — whether they are expressed or not, for instance, or the length of protein that they encode — depends on myriad external factors, from the diet to the environment in which the organism develops. And each trait can be influenced by many genes.

2022: Biological relativity revisited: The pre-eminent role of values.

(Noble & Ellis)

Multilevel interpretations of development and evolution take to heart the contextual nature of both those processes, and so necessarily assume top-down causation occurs, right down to the physics level. In this article we revisit the Principle of Biological Relativity proposed by Noble in 2012, where all emergent levels of organisation are equally causally valid. While this is true in general for physical interactions between levels, we argue that in the case of conscious organisms making rational choices, there is indeed a preferred causal origin – namely the overall embracing influence of meaning and values

2021: The value of treating cancer as an evolutionary disease.

(Shapiro & Noble)

Editorial for Special Issue on Evolution and Cancer: articles based on presentations to a symposium in mid-October, 2020 when researchers, biotechnologists and clinicians convened online in a Cancer and Evolution Symposium. The basic idea was to examine the proposition that cancer is a disease of somatic macroevolution.

2015: Central tenets of neo-Darwinism broken. Response to ‘Neo-Darwinism is just fine’.

(Denis Noble)

Response to a commentator: If, as the commentator seems to imply, we make neo-Darwinism so flexible as an idea that it can accept even those findings that the originators intended to be excluded by the theory it is then incumbent on modern neo-Darwinists to specify what would now falsify the theory. If nothing can do this then it is not a scientific theory.

2023: Bubbling beyond the barrier: exosomal RNA as a vehicle for soma–germline communication.

(Phillips & Noble)

Weismann’s barrier’ has restricted theories of heredity to the transmission of genomic variation for the better part of a century. However, the discovery and elucidation of epigenetic mechanisms of gene regulation such as DNA methylation and histone modifications has renewed interest in studies on the inheritance of acquired traits and given them mechanistic plausibility. Although it is now clear that these mechanisms allow many environmentally acquired traits to be transmitted to the offspring, how phenotypic information is communicated from the body to its gametes has remained a mystery.

2022: The origins and demise of selfish gene theory.

(D Noble & R Noble)

Selfish Gene Theory presents a severely narrowed down version of Huxley’s synthesis, which developed in the 1960s following the formulation of the Central Dogma of molecular biology by Francis Crick. The idea rests on three assumptions: the isolation of the genome from any influences by the soma and its development in interaction with the environment (the Weismann Barrier), one-way causation from DNA to proteins (The Central Dogma), and the auto-replication of DNA (Schrödinger’s aperiodic crystal). All three of these assumptions have now been shown to be incorrect

2022: The evolution of consciousness and agency.

(Denis Noble)

Conscious Agency is a major driver of evolution. Artificial Selection (i.e. Conscious Selection by human breeders) was the foil against which Charles Darwin defined Natural Selection. In later work, he extended Artificial Selection to other species. That ability for social (e.g. sexual) selection must have evolved. Jablonka and Ginsburg identify markers of conscious agency, such as Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL), and show that it must have existed at the time of the Cambrian Explosion. To their insights, my commentary argues that the harnessing of stochasticity was also involved in the evolution of the faculty of choice in organisms.

2022: Gregor Mendel at the source of genetics and systems biology. 

(Auffray & Noble)

Mendel benefitted from a very favourable context for the development of his experiments at St Thomas Monastery in Brno and was not isolated from the scientific community of his time. Although the notions on which his work was based were already present in scientific publications, this does not diminish the importance of Mendel’s contribution to the development of modern biology. We provide a detailed analysis of the results of his experiments on the development of hybrid plants that he presented in two lectures at the Brno Society of Natural History in 1865, demonstrating that beyond his major contribution to the foundation of genetics, Mendel was one of the pioneers of systems biology.

2023: Speciation by physiological selection of environmentally acquired traits.

(Noble & Phillips)

How might the inheritance of acquired traits overcome the problem of dilution by interbreeding and contribute to evolution. Darwin’s young protégé, George Romanes, developed ideas he discussed with Darwin and extended pangenesis to include a conceivable solution, published after Darwin’s death: physiological selection of fertility. In light of the ‘rediscovery’ of pangenesis, here we recount physiological selection as a testable hypothesis to explain how environmentally acquired characteristics could become coupled to the generation of species.

2024: Editorial for “The Gene: An Appraisal”

(Denis Noble)

Keith Baverstock’s article, “The Gene: An Appraisal”, is important since it argues that genome sequencing has generally found very low association scores for most genes in relation to the main multifactorial diseases that are resistant to a gene-centric analysis. Inevitably, that fact is also connected with the second fact, that very few strategies for curing such diseases have emerged from the results of genome sequencing.

2024: Editorial: “The Physiology of Evolution.” 

(Noble & Joyner)

Keith Baverstock’s article, “The Gene: An Appraisal”, is important since it argues that genome sequencing has generally found very low association scores for most genes in relation to the main multifactorial diseases that are resistant to a gene-centric analysis. Inevitably, that fact is also connected with the second fact, that very few strategies for curing such diseases have emerged from the results of genome sequencing.

2024: New lessons from biology for economics and business: a systems approach to non-market environments

(Lee, Mayer, Snower, Noble)

Drawing on recent advances in evolutionary biology, this paper describes a systems approach, ‘Systems Public Affairs’ (SPA), to integrate non-market strategies in corporate purposes and strategies. Just as the environment of organisms affects and is affected by their development and evolution, so individuals and businesses adjust to and can shape their non-market environment, which we define as ‘a historically formed national and social sphere, including laws, regulations, and policies, which supports, maintains and restrains the operation and preservation of markets’. Corporations can develop profitably faster just as evolution can develop faster than from Natural Selection alone.

2024: What genes can and cannot do

(Juan Pascual & Denis Noble)

We critique the gene-centric view of biology and disease to promote an organism-level of understanding. The genome is not a self-sufficient code, blueprint, or set of instructions. It is a tool orchestrated by the organism. We complement our critique with a framework where genes exhibit different degrees of biological relevance and modifiability and may result, when mutated or therapeutically modified, in unsuspected consequences. We propose that genetic mutation effects and modifiability depend on the number and complexity of associated protein–protein or higher-order interactions.

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Note: aside from a 1993 book, The logic of life: the challenge of integrative physiology, edited for the 1993 IUPS International Congress and published by OUP, all these publications follow Denis Noble’s retirement from his Oxford Chair in 2004. Before then, he avoided publishing on evolutionary biology, knowing that his work in this field would have risked the funding and salaries of his cardiac research team. That caution was fully justified when, in 2016, a protest letter to The Royal Society calling on the Society to cancel a meeting on New Trends in Evolutionary Biology denigrated his work in severely slanderous terms: “it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the situation is similar to the Society allowing advocates of homeopathy to organize a meeting on medical research.” None of the 21 distinguished signatories of that letter (all Fellows of The Royal Society) has ever replied to any of the publications listed here. The meeting went ahead and resulted in a Special Issue of the Royal Society journal Interface Focus, including Denis Noble’s own original article enunciating the principle of the harnessing of stochasticity in evolution for the first time. That centrally important paper was published under the cautiously bland title “Evolution viewed from physics, physiology and medicine.” Since 2017 many of the publications are co-authored with Raymond Noble, including the popular CUP book Understanding Living Systems.