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Is resilience a unifying concept for the biological sciences?
J Michael Reed1, Benjamin E Wolfe1, L Michael Romero1
1Department of Biology, Tufts University, Medford 02155, MA, USA.
Iscience
|April 25, 2024
Summary
Resilience concepts offer a unifying framework for biological sciences, from molecular to community levels. However, consistent application requires standardized metrics and a richer vocabulary for diverse perturbations.
Area of Science:
- Cross-disciplinary biological sciences
- Ecology
- Molecular biology
Background:
- Increasing interest in applying resilience concepts across biological scales.
- Uncertainty regarding resilience as a unifying concept in biology.
- Need to address interdisciplinary challenges like cancer and climate change.
Purpose of the Study:
- Ascertain commonalities and shortcomings in resilience measurement and interpretation.
- Review literature from molecular biology to community ecology.
- Evaluate the capacity for integrating resilience across biological sciences.
Main Methods:
- Literature review across diverse biological scales.
- Analysis of how resilience is measured and interpreted.
- Identification of conserved resilience mechanisms and tradeoffs.
Main Results:
- Resilience is studied at all biological organization levels, often without explicit use of the term.
- Conserved resilience mechanisms and tradeoffs exist across biological scales.
- Conceptual utility of resilience for understanding system responses to perturbations.
Conclusions:
- Resilience is a conceptually useful framework for biological systems.
- Need for a richer lexicon to describe diverse perturbations.
- Lack of widely applicable metrics hinders consistent integration of resilience.
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