Biological relativity is the British physiologist Denis Noble’s principle that in a living body there is no privileged level of causation: genes, proteins, cells, organs and the whole organism all act on one another, upwards and downwards, so no single level, the gene included, can be said to run the others. He set it out in a paper of 2012, after decades of building mathematical models of the heart. In Therapeutic Shamanism the world is nested in the same way, each individual a twig on a branch of a greater whole, everything in it conscious in its own way, and humans no better than any of the other Peoples.
Who is Denis Noble? #
A British physiologist, born in London in 1936, who made his name modelling the heart. His paper in Nature in 1960, and a fuller model in The Journal of Physiology in 1962, were among the first to simulate the heart’s electrical rhythm mathematically from experimental data. From 1984 to 2004 he was Burdon Sanderson Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of Balliol College, and he is now an emeritus professor there.1
Over the same years he became one of the best-known critics of the gene-centred view of life. He has written for general readers in The Music of Life (2006) and Dance to the Tune of Life (2016), and in 2014 he founded the Third Way of Evolution with the American biologist James Shapiro, a group of scientists who hold that the standard account of evolution needs a new framework.1
What is biological relativity? #
The idea that, in living things, cause does not flow in one direction only. The usual way of explaining an organism is from the bottom up: genes make proteins, proteins make cells, cells make tissues and organs, and so the whole body is in the end defined by its genome. Noble asked whether that is really how living systems work, and answered that it is not. Higher levels of organisation also act on lower ones. The state of the whole cell, organ or body sets the conditions within which the molecules work, so that cause runs downwards as well as upwards.2
His evidence came from the heart. The models he had worked on for decades, he found, could not work at all without causes running down from the higher levels to the lower ones; the activity of the parts makes sense only within the conditions set by the whole. In the mathematics, this shows up as the starting conditions and boundaries that the larger system places on the equations describing the smaller processes.2
From this he drew a general principle: that no level of causation in biology is privileged in advance. Each level, from the gene to the organism, can act on the others, and none is the starting point by right. He chose the word ‘relativity’ on purpose. In physics, relativity holds that no observer’s frame of reference is the privileged one. Biological relativity, as Noble presented it, extends that principle to the levels of a living system.2
How does it challenge the gene’s-eye view of life? #
By refusing the gene its place at the top. In the gene’s-eye view, made famous by the evolutionary biology of the 1970s, living bodies are vehicles that genes build in order to copy themselves. Noble turns this around. In The Music of Life he says that genes, far from building organisms, are better seen as prisoners of the organism, and that to understand what life is it has to be viewed at many different levels at once. The book is built around musical images of life, with one chapter picturing the genome as an organ of thirty thousand pipes; the pipes matter, but it is the living system that plays them.3
Is biological relativity widely accepted? #
It is respected and also disputed, especially where Noble has taken it into evolution. Sepehr Ehsani, reviewing Dance to the Tune of Life in 2018, asked whether biological relativity can produce hypotheses that are testable enough, and whether it does justice to diseases caused by a single faulty gene, where one level does seem to dominate. The evolutionary biologist Erik Svensson, writing in 2023, called the Third Way of Evolution a “fringe movement outside mainstream evolutionary biology”, objecting above all to Noble’s rejection of natural selection as the main cause of evolution.4
To the first kind of doubt, Noble’s 2012 paper already gives his answer: the models of the heart, in his account, show that causation from higher levels down is necessary, not optional, so treating the gene as the privileged cause is an assumption brought to the evidence, not something found in it.5 The sources used here do not give a reply from Noble to Svensson’s criticism of the Third Way of Evolution, and none is set out here.
How does biological relativity connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In its picture of a nested world in which every level is real. In shamanic reality, everything is connected to, and part of, everything else.6 A person is like the twig at the end of a branch. In ordinary reality each twig looks separate; trace it back and every human twig belongs to one branch, Human. Further back, Human joins Chimpanzee and Gorilla in Great Ape, then Mammal, then Animal; Animal and Plant are the two great trunks, and these join in the Stone People, rooted in Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this herself.7 The OversoulsOversoul. A branch of Mother Earth representing the whole of a species: the single being all the individuals arise from. Lower-World work is always with the Oversoul, never an individual; environments are composite Oversouls, wheels within wheels. More about this are those branches in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer. Fox Oversoul is the whole of Fox, the Great Fox that every individual fox comes from. Individuality is a characteristic of the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer, and wholeness a characteristic of the Lower-World.8 See What is an Oversoul?
Neither level cancels the other. A strong sense of being a separate individual is needed for survival; someone being stalked by a lion needs to feel very clearly the difference between themselves and the lion.6 And the body itself is a collective. Its thirty-seven trillion cells each want to stay alive, but what matters in the end is the body as a whole, and together, with little or no self-awareness of their own, they let a person experience being a self-aware individual.9 Noble’s account of cells, organs and organism acting on one another, with none of them in sole charge, describes the body in a way that sits easily beside this.
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see further, or differently? #
In what the levels are levels of. Noble’s principle is about cause within living systems. It says nothing about consciousness or Spirit, and it is a scientist’s claim about how bodies work. Therapeutic Shamanism speaks of consciousness itself. Everything is made of Spirit, and Spirit is conscious, so everything is conscious, the Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer and the Animal People alike, each in its own way.10 Consciousness also comes in different kinds. Humans are the most self-aware species and so the least collectively aware, and modern people tend to treat self-awareness as the highest form of consciousness, often the only one they recognise. Collective-awareness is another kind, not a lesser one, and all the grass on the planet is part of one single consciousness.11
The same humility runs through the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer. Hunter-gatherers saw the Stone People as the oldest and wisest, then the Plant People, then the Animal People, with humans the youngest and least wise of all; that order is not about hierarchy but about family.12 For hunter-gatherers, humans were not in any way special or better than any of the other Peoples, Animal, Plant or Stone; everything, humans included, was part of an interconnected web of life.13 Biological relativity, for its part, denies the gene any privileged place in the body. See What is the myth of human supremacy? and What did Lynn Margulis teach about symbiosis and the porous individual?
