Keyword: metabolism

At the core of life is adaptivity, the organismal process of adjusting to ever-changing conditions. But despite its centrality, adaptivity is a surprisingly lonely concept. Its most immediate lexical relatives are parts of entirely distinct evolutionary conversations: ‘adapting’ immediately evokes thoughts of natural selection, ‘adaptive’ (typically paired with ‘maladaptive’) is used in normative evaluations of […]

An Interview with Jannie Hofmeyr in Three Parts What is life? This is a question biologists have almost forgotten to ask. Apart from a few lonely souls who occupy themselves with astrobiology or the origin of life, we no longer seem to wonder about life itself. Maybe we have lost the forest for the trees? […]