The fractal metabolism: Relearning how to flow

Look closely at a river delta, a tree branch, or the veins of a leaf. Then look again — at a lightning bolt, a lung, or the neural web of your brain.

They all follow the same logic: a branching geometry of flow.

This is not a coincidence. It is the signature of existence — the universe writing itself in recursive lines, from the shape of galaxies to the architecture of thought.

Physicist Adrian Bejan called it the Constructal Law: for any system to persist in time, it must evolve to ease the flow of energy, matter, and information through it.

Nature, in other words, builds for movement. Life endures by flowing.

From the spiral of a galaxy to the branching of trees and neurons, every structure that survives does so by facilitating the circulation of energy. That’s what we are, too: not separate from nature, but one of its many fractal expressions — energy becoming self-aware of its own movement.

We are the pattern

Neuroscientist Victor Dyakin-Sosnovsky describes this emerging understanding as fractal biology: the study of how life organizes itself through repeating patterns that scale from the molecular to the planetary.

New findings in this field reveal that fractal organization is not just a metaphor — it’s a measurable biological principle. Cells and tissues are structured fractally to maximize efficiency of energy and nutrient flow. The same statistical scaling laws that describe rivers or lightning also describe blood vessels, bronchial trees, and even the structure of neural networks.

What’s more, researchers now find that consciousness itself may have a fractal signature. The geometry of brain activity mirrors the branching patterns of nature, suggesting that thought is a form of flow — information self-organizing through nested levels of complexity.

In short, the universe is self-similar. Every level mirrors the next.

Atoms form molecules.

Molecules form organelles.

Cells form organisms.

Organisms form ecosystems.

Ecosystems interlock to form the biosphere.

Each layer of life builds on the same recursive logic: optimizing the movement of energy through ever more complex forms.

The latest research calls this “recursive embodiment” — the idea that life continually folds energy into new patterns that repeat and refine themselves across scales.

We are not in nature.

We are nature — thinking, building, and dreaming within itself.

To live well, then, is to move well — to participate gracefully in the flow that made us.

But somewhere along the way, our species began to dam the river.

The metabolism of power

Economist Giorgos Kallis argues that our civilization runs not on scarcity but on excess. Every second, the sun floods Earth with ten thousand times more energy than humanity consumes. The fundamental problem of human existence has never been lack, but what to do with abundance.

Early societies responded with ritual and gratitude. They spent surplus through festivals, art, and collective celebration — returning excess energy to the cycle of life. But modern civilization transformed this overflow into machinery for multiplication. We no longer spend our surplus — we reinvest it. We turned the feast into a factory.

That’s the great inversion of the modern age: instead of flowing with abundance, we built systems to trap it. We redefined sunlight as capital, surplus as profit, and flow as control.

What emerged is what Kallis calls a social metabolism of power — a system that takes in the planet’s energy, transforms it through labor and technology, and excretes waste, inequality, and entropy. Growth, in this light, is not a natural process. It’s a political project — one that decides who captures the surplus and who pays its cost.

From coal to data, every form of surplus today flows through three intertwined channels:

1. The physical surplus — energy extracted from the Earth.

2. The economic surplus — value produced and accumulated.

3. The political surplus — power exercised over those who produce it.

The global economy is, quite literally, an engine that converts sunlight into hierarchy.

When flow becomes control

In nature, flow sustains life. In human civilization, flow has been replaced by control.

Our energy systems concentrate generation in a few massive plants rather than distributing it like sunlight through a forest canopy. Our economies hoard wealth instead of circulating it. Our cities inhale resources and exhale waste.

We built a civilization that defies the Constructal Law — that seeks not to ease flow, but to dominate it.

But what doesn’t flow, dies.

This is why our societies feel so brittle, why crises compound: the channels of life have become bottlenecks of power. The surplus that once pulsed through our collective body now clogs in its arteries — fossilized in capital, carbon, and control.

The curse of the sun

Georges Bataille once called this abundance the “accursed share.” The sun gives more than we can use; its generosity forces us to decide how to spend the excess. Every civilization must confront this curse of abundance: what to do with the overflow of energy that life provides.

Capitalism’s answer was reinvestment — an endless loop of surplus feeding surplus. But this loop is now consuming its host. We burn the sun faster than the sun gives. The feast has become a furnace.

Kallis reminds us that every engine has limits — physical and social. As the energy required to extract energy increases, and as the human capacity to endure inequality breaks, the system enters decline. The flow has turned against itself.

Reclaiming the fractal flow

To survive, we must unlearn the logic of control and return to the logic of flow.

If the Constructal Law reveals how life persists, and Kallis’s surplus theory reveals how power distorts that persistence, then our task is to reconnect the two — to design systems where energy, value, and agency flow freely once again.

This means treating the economy as part of Earth’s metabolism, not its master. It means designing infrastructures — physical and social — that move like rivers: distributed, adaptive, and self-regulating.

It means reimagining surplus not as fuel for accumulation, but as a commons for care. The hours now spent producing disposable luxuries could be redirected toward restoration, education, and art — acts that return energy to the cycle of life.

In this sense, degrowth is not about less — it’s about different. It’s about redirecting flow from profit to participation, from extraction to regeneration.

And here’s where the new science of fractal biology gives us more than a metaphor — it gives us a blueprint.

Every living system, from forests to organs, maintains its health through distributed self-organization. No single node controls the whole; intelligence arises from the pattern of interactions.

This means our political and economic systems could — and must — be restructured the same way: as fractal democracies, self-similar across scales, where each part reflects and reinforces the health of the whole.

Flow as ethics

If we take the fractal law seriously, it gives us a new definition of justice:

Flow — whether of energy, information, or opportunity — must remain open and equitable.

When power pools, systems stagnate. When flow circulates, systems thrive.

This is as true for ecosystems as it is for economies. The task of politics, then, is not to manage scarcity but to ensure circulation — to keep the flow of life moving through all parts of the whole.

Sustainability is not balance in stillness, but balance in motion.

Becoming the continuation

The Constructal Law teaches that to persist is to flow; Kallis teaches that to flow ethically is to redistribute power. Together, they outline a new cosmology for a full world — one where abundance is not hoarded but shared, and where human design mirrors the self-organizing beauty of life itself.

We are not here to dominate the pattern — we are the pattern, continuing itself through consciousness.

The future will not be built by those who manage scarcity, but by those who learn to dance with excess — to turn the curse of the sun into a song of reciprocity.

Because everything that endures — rivers, trees, galaxies, and minds — shares one truth:

They move. They connect. They flow.

And so must we.

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Source

Dyakin-Sosnovsky, V. (2024). Fractal biology — Evolution from molecular to cognitive, and psychological dimensions. Qeios. https://doi.org/10.32388/X0DUH1.2

Bejan, A. (2002). Constructal theory of organization in nature: Dendritic flows, allometric laws and flight. In C. A. Brebbia, L. Sucharov, & P. Pascolo (Eds.), Design and Nature (pp. 57–66). WIT Press.

Kallis, G. (2021, April 8). Political ecological economics and the nature of economic growth [Video]. YouTube. Real Postgrowth Talks. https://youtu.be/tJw7wKjiO60