Information-Theoretic Origins of Universality in Stochastic Biological Systems

Metabolic rate scales with body size, however its universality remains debated and unresolved. We show that such universal scaling may arise from information neutrality in stochastic cell dynamics. Using a stochastic ontogenetic growth model of cellular dynamics, we identify an optimal microscopic noise structure where organism level metabolic fluctuations are least sensitive to the underlying microscopic cellular noise and have maximal dependence on organism size. At this point, the macroscopic scaling exponent collapses to a universal value across species size close to Kleiber’s law. These results reveal a noncritical RG-like behavior, suggesting that universality emerges here from an information-theoretic optimum of stochastic metabolic fluctuations.