Metabolic fluctuations explain allometric scaling diversity

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 redistributed among fluctuating cellular states. When applied across diverse life histories, the model reproduces the observed range of metabolic exponents, revealing that scaling diversity arises naturally from fundamental thermodynamic constraints on stochastic, energy-dissipating growth.