The Music of Life: Biology Beyond the Genome by Denis Noble Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK 176 pp, $25/£13 ISBN 0199295735 ![][1] Tonight, Mahler's 8th Symphony will be performed. As the orchestra prepares, I cannot refrain from a little arithmetic gymnastics. There are almost 1,000 performers on stage, each playing over a range of two and a half octaves, one octave has 12 tones, that is 30,000 different tones in total. As many as the number of genes in our genome! The coincidence is of course anecdotal, but the sense of wonder is perhaps related: how can harmony emerge from such tumultuous interactions between so many different players? It therefore comes as no surprise that Denis Noble—one of the pioneers of the discipline of systems biology—uses many musical metaphors in The Music of Life: Biology Beyond the Genome to illustrate how biology tackles the complexity of living organisms. In an insightful and audacious demonstration of how metaphors can illuminate the same conceptual problem from different angles, Noble begins by turning one of Richard Dawkins' metaphors upside down. In The Selfish Gene , Dawkins wrote, “Now they [the genes] swarm in huge colonies, safe … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif