School of Biological Sciences and Centre for Geometric Biology, Monash University, Clayton 3800, Victoria, Australia.
Science. 2022 Aug 19;377(6608):834-839. doi: 10.1126/science.abm7649. Epub 2022 Aug 18.
Organisms use energy to grow and reproduce, so the processes of energy metabolism and biological production should be tightly bound. On the basis of this tenet, we developed and tested a new theory that predicts the relationships among three fundamental aspects of life: metabolic rate, growth, and reproduction. We show that the optimization of these processes yields the observed allometries of metazoan life, particularly metabolic scaling. We conclude that metabolism, growth, and reproduction are inextricably linked; that together they determine fitness; and, in contrast to longstanding dogma, that no single component drives another. Our model predicts that anthropogenic change will cause animals to evolve decreased scaling exponents of metabolism, increased growth rates, and reduced lifetime reproductive outputs, with worrying consequences for the replenishment of future populations.
生物利用能量来生长和繁殖，因此能量代谢和生物生产过程应该紧密结合。基于这一原则，我们提出并检验了一个新的理论，该理论预测了生命的三个基本方面：代谢率、生长和繁殖之间的关系。我们表明，这些过程的优化产生了后生动物生命中观察到的异速生长，特别是代谢缩放。我们的结论是，新陈代谢、生长和繁殖是紧密相连的；它们共同决定了适合度；与长期以来的教条相反，没有一个单一的因素驱动另一个因素。我们的模型预测，人为变化将导致动物进化出代谢缩放指数降低、生长速率增加和终生繁殖输出减少，这对未来种群的补充将产生令人担忧的后果。
