The Ordering Principle

Professor Denis Noble CBE FRS
Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford

Every epoch in science triggers a transformation not just of knowledge, but of imagination—of how humanity perceives its place in the cosmos. The Copernican revolution displaced us from the centre of the universe; Darwin’s evolution re‑joined us with all living beings; Einstein’s relativity fused time and space into one living fabric. If confirmed, dynamic symmetry—sometimes called Edge theory—could herald the next such shift: a worldview in which everything—matter, life, mind, and society—unfolds through a single principle of balance in motion.

When Benedict Rattigan first came to see me in 2019 to discuss his developing work on what he called dynamic symmetry theory, I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. Some three years earlier, during a lecture at the Royal Society and in a paper that followed, I had advanced an idea that living systems owe much of their adaptability to what classical genetics had often treated as its opposite—randomness. I described this as the harnessing of stochasticity: the use of the unpredictable to generate stability, adaptation, and creativity in biological systems.

Rattigan, emerging from an entirely different tradition, was attempting to articulate the same intuition in mathematical and philosophical terms. A philosopher by training, he was constructing an elegant model of coherence showing how order and disorder are not opposing poles but necessary partners in evolution. The moment he described his approach, I recognised our shared insight. Two distinct disciplines—biology and philosophy—had converged on a single generative principle. The experience was one of those rare moments of intellectual contact in which the boundaries between fields quietly dissolve...

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