Denis Noble is a brilliant man and a fantastic scientist, as he tells us in his book, however; the same cannot be said of his writing style. The main theme of his book is that there is no blueprint for life; the genome cannot simply be used as a template to build an organism on its own. The organization of the book includes ten chapters, each of which uses a different musical metaphor to describe life, starting from the genome and reaching up to the brain. Noble attempts to make his views on biology easier for the reader to understand by using current biology metaphors and then rewriting them. Strangely, he states that “…of course there are always limits to the validity of the metaphor. They are ladders to understanding. Once you have climbed them, you can throw them away.” While Noble seems to know his science, he should probably stick to doing research and not write books about biology metaphors. The first chapter is entitled "The CD of life: the genome". Noble introduces the reader to fictional creatures called Silman who appear several times in the book. They are silicone-based life forms and are used by Noble to compare the genome to a CD, claiming that it is simply a code to be deciphered. After showing how senseless the Silmans are, the reader realizes that the Silmans are actually metaphors to describe the fact that early scientists were ignorant in thinking that DNA was the "program of life." Noble then goes on to explain why the “reductionist causal chain” (basically that the genotype leads to the phenotype) seems too simple to be correct. A recurring theme throughout the rest of the book is that Noble makes ideas much more difficult than they actually need to be. Noble very effectively… middle of paper… to RNA and translation into proteins, as well as gene expression. Noble does an excellent job of presenting an opposing view to the central dogma of biology, using metaphors to attempt to make his differing opinions clearer to the reader. Although Noble uses a lot of scientific evidence to support his opinions, his use of metaphors is overwhelming and can easily distract the reader from the point he is trying to make. Nobles' explanations of gene expression help the reader understand the process of evolution, providing a more or less clear view of how redundancy in the genome can lead to variation. Noble neglects, however, to delve into natural selection or any other ideas related to evolution. If these ideas were present, they would have been lost somewhere among the overuse of metaphors and overly detailed explanations of cell signaling processes.