Well then, we'll just disagree. I tend to think the fact that not one single scientific entity has adopted or currently uses Noble's framework is a very good indication that the arguments he made years ago have had little to no impact.
What on earth would constitute a "single scientific entity" or indeed Noble's framework? The man was a crucial figure in the development of systems biology and a major source for work across disciplines relating to conceptual reforms in biology and related fields. He's a leading research scientist and one of the more influential researchers in the life sciences of the latter 20th and 21st centuries. This is so tired. Coming back at an argument with "it's not used" isn't an argument even if it were true, and it isn't.
You think his 9 year old paper that argues for a framework that no one has since employed constitutes "the latest"?
Just for fun, I went looking a bit for some papers that didn't just rely on Noble's work but built specifically on that paper (although most of the time that's not how scientific research works at all, nor references in a scientific paper either, in which it is typical to site sequentially work that is done over years by one or more individuals on a single research project or question or the like ). It didn't take long to find counterexamples for you. I mean, one recent paper literally opens with references to Noble and his work:
"In his recent article, Noble listed the four illusions of the Modern Synthesis (MS) that have been exposed by the development of science largely this century, some eighty years after their formulation (Noble, 2021a). They are: Natural Selection, Weissmann Barrier, Rejection of Darwin Gemmules, and Central Dogma. He ascribed these illusions to unintended errors of eminent scientists due to imprecise and misleading use of linguistic terms in interpreting evidence and theorizing about evolution. As a physiologist and a systems' biologist who is thinking deeply about evolution, he wants readers to change their view of how organisms work, away from MS's upward causality of “DNA brain” controlling every function of a cell, to a downward hierarchical causality of the wholeness of the cellular system, his principle of biological relativity. To uncover MS's illusions, he uses many arguments and concepts that the careful reader will find in this paper as well.
Noble's perspectives also reflect the general viewpoints promoted by the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES), the movement that was initiated in the 1950s by Wadington (1957), popularized in the 1980s by Gould and Eldredge (1993), and reconceptualized by Pigliucci (2007) and Muller (2007)."
Crkvenjakov, R., & Heng, H. H. (2021). Further illusions: On key evolutionary mechanisms that could never fit with Modern Synthesis.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology.
(see attached)
Not that this was it, of course:
"we ourselves and many others over the years have considered neo-Darwinism itself as being in need of major conceptual reform. While it unquestionably deserves respect as the over-arching foundation theory of biology it no longer reflects the actual state of affairs concerning the totality of life, its history and how it may have emerged and evolved both on Earth and throughout the Cosmos (Steele, 1979, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1982, Bateson et al., 2017, Noble, 2013, Noble, 2017, Noble, 2019)."
Steele, E. J., Gorczynski, R. M., Lindley, R. A., Liu, Y., Temple, R., Tokoro, G., ... & Wickramasinghe, N. C. (2019).
Lamarck and panspermia-on the efficient spread of living systems throughout the cosmos.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology,
149, 10-32.
"
Adaptive improvisation as a complement for natural selection at the single individual level
This principle of self-organization offers a conceptual process enabling adaptation to novel stressful conditions occurring during the lifetime of every single individual. As such, it addresses a critical limitation of natural selection and specifies an efficient new way in which physiology might contribute to evolutionary processes [50, 143, 144]."
[NOTE: 143 is Noble's paper in question, although he also authored or co-authored 50 and 144]
Soen, Y., Knafo, M., & Elgart, M. (2015).
A principle of organization which facilitates broad Lamarckian-like adaptations by improvisation.
Biology direct,
10(1), 1-17.
Noble's paper you dismiss along with others is even incorporated into cutting edge cancer research:
"Currently, as interest in identifying different organic codes increases (Barbieri, 1998, 2018), it is necessary to unify these codes under system inheritance (Heng and Heng, 2021). Such discussions will also promote a 21st century view of evolution (Shapiro, 2011, 2019;
Noble, 2013, 2016).
Traditionally, most evolutionary researchers are not familiar with cancer evolution and consider cancer unsuitable for organismal evolutionary studies (Heng, 2015). Curiously, some well-respected scholars such as Huxley and Van Valen have long considered cancers as new biological species. In recent years, an increased number of evolutionary researchers have joined this exciting field (Ling et al., 2015; Roche et al., 2018; Sun et al., 2018; Somarelli et al., 2020). By showing how cancer can be used as a system to study evolutionary principles, we hope more evolutionary biologists will join its ranks.
This was one of the main goals of our Cancer and Evolution Symposium (see Shapiro, Shapiro, and Noble, in this issue)." (emphases added)
Heng, J., & Heng, H. H. (2021). Two-phased evolution: Genome chaos-mediated information creation and maintenance.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology,
165, 29-42. (see attached}
Really, this is getting pathetic. It's the kind or argument I expect from creationists. Back-peddling,
ad hominem attacks on a researcher, special pleading, and general denigration of any work presented as counter-evidence.
