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Review
. 2024 Apr 10;27(5):109478.
doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.109478. eCollection 2024 May 17.

Is resilience a unifying concept for the biological sciences?

J Michael Reed  1 , Benjamin E Wolfe  1 , L Michael Romero  1
Affiliations
Review

Is resilience a unifying concept for the biological sciences?

J Michael Reed et al. iScience. .

Abstract

There is increasing interest in applying resilience concepts at different scales of biological organization to address major interdisciplinary challenges from cancer to climate change. It is unclear, however, whether resilience can be a unifying concept consistently applied across the breadth of the biological sciences, or whether there is limited capacity for integration. In this review, we draw on literature from molecular biology to community ecology to ascertain commonalities and shortcomings in how resilience is measured and interpreted. Resilience is studied at all levels of biological organization, although the term is often not used. There is a suite of resilience mechanisms conserved across biological scales, and there are tradeoffs that affect resilience. Resilience is conceptually useful to help diverse researchers think about how biological systems respond to perturbations, but we need a richer lexicon to describe the diversity of perturbations, and we lack widely applicable metrics of resilience.

Keywords: Biological sciences; Ecology; Evolutionary biology; Molecular biology; Systems biology.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

None
Graphical abstract
Figure 1
Figure 1
Examples of biological resilience
Figure 2
Figure 2
Example biological systems, perturbations, and measures of resilience, and associated scales of time and space
Figure 3
Figure 3
A depiction of the various levels of biological organization discussed here, and the associated observations about resilience
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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