Metabolism in Crisis? A New Interplay Between Physiology and Ecology

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter investigates the hybrid relationships between metabolism, broadly and a-historically understood as the set of processes through which alien matter is made homogeneous to that of the organism, and forms of vitalism from the eighteenth century on. While metabolic processes have long been modeled in a reductionist fashion as a straightforward function of repair and expansion of a given structure (either chemically, or mechanistically), a challenging vitalist view has characterized metabolism as a creative, organizing, vital faculty. I suggest that this tension was overcome in Claude Bernard’s works on “indirect nutrition”, in which nutrition, rightly conceived as a general vital phenomenon common to plants and animals, was both characterized as an instance of the general physico-chemical determinism of all phenomena and as the sign and condition of the “freedom and independence” of the organism with respect to the environment. I propose that Bernard’s theory of indirect nutrition was central in the elaboration of his general physiology and has, at the same time, underpinned a self-centered view of biological identity in which the organism creates itself continuously at the detriment of its externalmilieu. I further argue that this conception of biological individuality as metabolically constructed has since, and paradoxically, supported a view in which the organism appears as an autonomous and self-creating entity. I then contrast this classical view of the metabolic autonomy of the organism with the challenges raised by microbiome studies and suggest that these emerging fields contribute to sketch an ecological conception of the organism and its metabolism through the reconceptualization of its relationship with the environment. The recent focus on a “microbiota – host metabolism” axis contributes to shift the focus away from the classical concept of organism, somehow externalizing vitalism out of the autonomous individual in favor of an ecological, collaborative, and interactionist view of the living.