That 'universal law' of how animals burn energy might just be a random side effect of how cells grow.
March 30, 2026
Original Paper
Metabolic fluctuations explain allometric scaling diversity
bioRxiv · 2025.11.06.686202
The Takeaway
For nearly a century, biologists assumed the relationship between an animal's size and its metabolism was a fixed law of nature. This paper proposes that this scaling isn't a pre-determined rule, but rather emerges naturally from the basic physics of how energy is lost during the stochastic growth of cells.
From the abstract
Metabolic scaling, the relationship between energy use and body size, has long been treated as a universal law of life. However, extensive variation in scaling exponents across species challenges this assumption. Here, we show that such scaling can emerge spontaneously from stochastic cellular growth dynamics, without postulating any fixed relationship between mass and metabolism. In our framework, ontogeny is a nonequilibrium thermodynamic process in which energy is continuously dissipated and