DENIS NOBLE
ONE OF MY HEROES ... GENE
With an insatiable appetite for learning and discovery, Denis Noble engages deeply with both scientific and artistic endeavors, maintaining a passion for life he sees as key to longevity. He discusses his biggest argument with the Neo-Darwinists, how the Oxford Longevity Project he co-founded encourages people to feel in control of their health and wellbeing, and his strategy for coping with an overload of tasks.
January 10, 2023
Innovator, scientist, musician,
ballroom dancer, and Oxford University Emeritus Professor of Cardiovascular
Physiology Denis Noble could be lying back reminiscing about developing
the first mathematical model of cardiac cells way back in 1960 when he was in his
twenties. Instead, he has just taken up dancing, gives musical performances in
an obscure European language he had to learn in order to perform, and is
reveling in his role as the champion of human creativity as the chief
intellectual antagonist of the so-called Neo-Darwinists.
Speaking with Denis is about as energizing and stimulating a conversation as one will
ever have. The man is simply filled with passion and energy. Here is
Denis clearly enjoying eviscerating Richard Dawkins on stage as they debate the
question of destiny being gene driven. Hint: it’s not, and, should anyone think
otherwise and aspire to take on Denis, I would advise against it. Here is Denis
the musician performing with the Oxford Trobadors. Here is Denis’s recently co-founded
endeavor the Oxford Longevity
Project. His appetite for learning and discovery seems to know
no limits.
If one ever doubted that passion
and curiosity are the fuel for a long and highly engaged
life, Denis Noble is the counter argument. His days are filled with the widest
range of interests and pursuits imaginable, which in itself sounds like a
pretty good recipe for longevity.
There’s a lot going
on in your world these days.
Absolutely. I’m up to here and a bit
beyond too, I tell you. I’ve never been busier in my life. I seem to be
enjoying it.
“The argument with the Neo-Darwinists
has taken off in a big way”
What are some of
the things that have been occupying you?
The argument with the Neo-Darwinists
has taken off in a big way. I started having that argument with the standard
evolutionary biologists way back in about 2006 when I published a little book
called The Music of Life.
I’m not familiar
with the argument with the Neo-Darwinists. What is the objection?
Neo-Darwinists like Richard Dawkins,
the author of The Selfish Gene, would say something like we
only think we have freedom of choice, that we are cultural inventors, that we
can produce music, that we can produce new plays and all the rest of it, but it
is a mirage. This is, of course, a deeply unsatisfactory view of humanity.
Well, damn me, that’s just not true. It was important to try to pin this down
because it has implications in almost all walks of life. I’m a musician as
well, you see, and I know when a new piece of music has been created, you
cannot predict that a Beethoven will occur but, by God, when it’s happened, you
know; you realize what he’s done, and that’s humanity. They seem to want to
deny that it is there. That’s it in a nutshell.
That is highly
reductionist. They mean we have no free will?
It is precisely; they are the arch
reductionists, exactly so. We are born selfish because we can’t help it. It’s
just our genes that make us selfish. There was a man in the United States a
number of years ago who actually argued in court that although it was obviously
true that he had pulled a trigger and killed somebody, it wasn’t him who did
it. Now, that didn’t get the jury to avoid convicting him but it did
eventually, with a very clever lawyer, persuade the judge to give him a more
lenient sentence, and it’s extraordinary. I mean, that’s why I say that
although reduction is nonsense, it permeates all walks of life. Nothing is
immune from the effect that it produces. The consequence is I now have the
world at my door asking for more articles, more debates. I get invited even to
go to Moscow to debate it all and lecture.
So Putin, he’s just
doing what he has to do, he can’t help it?
Of course. Exactly. Can’t help it.
No, precisely. That is the issue. You couldn’t put it better. Of course, when
you and I listen to an absolutely superb musical performer, of course he can’t
help it either.
“This comes to the question of
longevity because I think if you persuade people that they do not have control,
they get very depressed”
I had no idea that
this was going on. It’s ridiculous, but fascinating that someone would hold to
that view.
This is ridiculous because it’s gone
on for over 50 years. The book, The Selfish Gene was published
in 1976. It’s permeated life in so many ways and I see it as the opposite of
healthy. This comes to the question of longevity because I think if you
persuade people that they do not have control, they get very depressed.
Is what you are
saying that there’s no agency?
Precisely, and it relates to the
aging problem and one of the reasons why I helped to form the Oxford Longevity
Project. It is important in relation to health and old age. You
should be encouraging people to feel in control.
Now obviously, unfortunately, there
are terrible health problems that people can’t do very much about. However, in
general, the best thing to do is encourage them — get dancing, get doing
something. People have free will and what they do will have an effect.
I guess where we’re
coming from is that you have responsibility, you have agency. You are maybe 10%
the output of your genes, and the other 90% is what are you doing. And that’s
up to you.
Yes. I don’t believe in giving
numbers to it because I think it can be more than 90%. You can cultivate that
agency; I think that’s what artists and musicians do. I think it’s what
scientists who are creative do. The really creative scientists are actually
going beyond what you can naturally predict somebody will do. I don’t know what
percentage you give to agency, because if they do something totally novel, they
are a new Beethoven, a new Mozart, or a new Einstein, then I don’t know what
percentage you then give to their agency. I mean, it’s just huge, isn’t it?
You’re way outside the normal range of what people manage to do in life. I
think it could be greater than even 100%. It becomes 150% because a really
creative individual does something that makes you say, “Wow, how on earth could
he do that?”
“I think encouraging people to be
creative is part of what helps them to keep healthy in later life”
The flip side of
the coin is that if you don’t believe you have agency then you just have to
accept your grim reality, if that is what you feel age is. You have no agency,
this is all there is, just suck it up.
Absolutely. Well, you see, the
interesting thing is that one of the most vociferous Neo-Darwinists, that’s
Jerry Coyne in Chicago, he writes: We all think we have the ability to choose,
but that’s not the case. We might ponder why it is that evolution has given us
such a strong impression of an illusion. So, it’s all an illusion. I don’t know
what Beethoven would have thought about him being told producing The 9th Symphony
was a total illusion. You thought you did that. Well, yes, we know you did
that, but your genes made you do that. Not you, Beethoven. This is one of the
deepest insults you could give to a really creative individual. Anyway, back to
the point, I think encouraging people to be creative is part of what helps them
to keep healthy in later life. It’s saying, in effect, we have more agency than
perhaps we really think. You’ve got to encourage people to think that. That
very fact of encouraging them can itself be a contribution to good health.
That’s right. Well,
that’s what we do.
I’m sure you do, yes. I’d love to
encourage people like you that are pushing that message out. I think what we
found in running the Oxford Longevity Project now for a year or two is that
it’s a phenomenon that cuts across. It is not just, can you get a good drug
that keeps you going on until whatever age you want to try and be, it’s what
you can do to help yourself to do that. That’s the way I see it. That’s partly
why I was very happy to join Leslie Kenny and the other people she’s got
involved in this to do the Oxford Longevity Project.
The cost of an aging population that is not healthy actually is
shocking. Somehow, we’ve got to do something about that because otherwise we’re
living with a time bomb as the years go by and more and more people end up
doing more than three score years and 10; the cost of that, if they’re not
healthy, is enormous.
Absolutely. I would
say, on the converse of that, if people who are aging are healthy, they become
contributors, consumers, and taxpayers.
Exactly. Well, here in the UK, I
remember the days when the National Health Service was set up, in around 1947,
and the argument for it was: if you keep the whole working population healthy,
they will be more productive. That was the argument then. Of course, nobody
imagined then that you could have people living to 80, 90, a 100, in numbers
that were actually sizeable. Because, unfortunately, most of them need
enormously expensive social care. There’s a huge balance here, isn’t there?
That is another reason why one of the first broadcasts we did on the Oxford Longevity
Project was with economists as one of the people had written
about the economic cost of doing nothing, which is a very good argument for
doing something.
Ballroom Dancing
Absolutely.
Yes. I think it’s very clear that is
true. I’ll tell you a little story that would be perhaps a good personal story
for you. I started, at the age of 84, taking up ballroom dancing. I had to do
something, you see. I’m no good at sports, I can tell you. I now go to
Blackpool. It’s got the most famous dance hall in the United Kingdom,
extraordinary gilt Victorian building in the Blackpool Tower that goes shooting
up like the Eiffel Tower. Anyway, I’m enjoying myself doing it. That was a
deliberate decision, me as an agent saying: take up something new. And then I
found something else interesting.
In dancing, there’s about 1000
routines that you might want to try to learn. It’s all up here. My goodness, is
it a challenge to try and learn all the things? Well, I’m also a musician, so I
know what the challenge is.
The experience of finding out what
it’s like to go swing around on the magnificent dance floor and often enough
with a reasonably handsome or beautiful partner, that’s an experience and is
great fun. It was a choice to try this. We’re back to agency.
I know you’re a
musician of some accomplishment. Talk to me about the intersection of music.
You’re not the first highly accomplished scientist that I’ve spoken to who’s
also a musician.
It is fascinating. Yes, Einstein
played the violin and there are many good physicists who became fascinated by
the physics of music.
“Take it step by step and then you
get surprised by how much you can actually do in a day”
Because you’re so
busy and you’re operating on many different threads happening all the time, how
do you organize your day?
I have a focusing method. Literally
today I’ve just come back from France and this happens. I was away for a few
days to see to something down there, and I’ve come back to an email box on my
university website that has about 200 emails in it and to a Gmail email system
which has, I don’t know, close to 500. To me, the way of coping with what is
obviously an overload is just to ignore most of it for at least an hour or two
while you do X, Y, and Z. Take it step by step and then you get surprised by
how much you can actually do in a day.
What are the three
non-negotiables in your life?
Three non-negotiables would be, one:
don’t just think that I am just a scientist. I think it’s very important for
people to get out of that mindset in which you think reductively. I think it’s
a bad thing to do. Point one, so that’s non-negotiable, I need my artistic side
or whatever you want to call it. Non-negotiable number two: don’t deprive me of
eating curries, eating kimchi, eating all the fantastic delights I found all
over the world that make it such a rich thing to discover what humans have done
with the food that they eat. Non-negotiable, number three: goodness, that gets
a bit difficult. Goodness me, do I really need three? Maybe that’s the non-negotiable
thing. Don’t put me in a position where I have to produce three non-negotiable
things.
I accept that.
If that will do, then that’s number
three.
I want to just add,
as an aside here, my favorite Nietzsche quote, which is, “The will to systematize
indicates a lack of integrity.”
I see where that’s going. Yes,
indeed. That’s absolutely right.
Connect with Denis:
Website
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Lectures
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