Raymond Noble

Life is definitively purposive and creative. Organisms use genes in controlling their destiny. This book presents a paradigm shift in understanding living systems. The genome is not a code, blueprint or set of instructions. It is a tool orchestrated by the system. This book shows that gene-centrism misrepresents what genes are and how they are used by living systems. It demonstrates how organisms make choices, influencing their behaviour, their development and evolution, and act as agents of natural selection. It presents a novel approach to fundamental philosophical and cultural issues, such as free-will. Reading this book will make you see life in a new light, as a marvellous phenomenon, and in some sense a triumph of evolution. We are not in our genes, our genes are in us.

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. The higher levels constrain the dynamics of lower levels. The experimental evidence and theoretical arguments are shown to be consistent with previous research on the neuronal mechanisms of conscious choice, and with the interconnected multi-level processes by which organisms harness stochasticity, whether conscious or unconscious.