Concept
Metabolism
Overview
set of chemical reactions and pathways by which living organisms transform chemical substances
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Ending here this exposition, somewhat too speculative and running into details inappropriate to a work of this kind, it suffices to note the most general facts concerning metabolism. Regarded as a whole it includes, in the first place, those anabolic or building-up processes specially characterizing plants, during which the impacts of ethereal undulations are stored up in compound molecules of…
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology, Volume 1
The chapter “METABOLISM.” is titled for Metabolism; opens on Metabolism.
with states of intoxication or of abstinence. The two groups of affections are brought still closer together by comparison with conditions like Basedow’s disease[49] that have also been found to result from poisoning, not, however, from poisons derived externally, but from such as arise in the internal metabolism. In my opinion these analogies necessitate our regarding the neuroses as the effects of disturbances in…
Sigmund Freud, Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis
States what Metabolism is; names Metabolism several times.
Whenever we discover life we also find it bound up with protoplasm, and when we find a piece of protoplasm not in solution there we find also life, without exception. Doubtless the presence of other chemical constituents is necessary to a living body, to produce the various differentiations of these elements of life. They are not necessary to life in itself, hence they enter as food and become transformed into…
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
Close in meaning to Metabolism; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
- Second law of thermodynamics
- Homeostasis
- Ancient Greek
- Action potential
- Vitalism
- Antibiotic
- Life
- Virus
- Molecule
- Organism
- Diffusion
- Holism
- Nucleic acid
- Oxygen
- Ibn al-Nafis
- Aristotle
- Parasitism
- Biotechnology
- Reductionism
- Carbon
- Experiment
- Classical element
- Glutamic acid
- DNA
Place in the tradition
Part of Meaning of life.