Why does metabolism scale with temperature?

At a fundamental level, all of ecology is underpinned by the laws of thermodynamics, the conservation of matter and the general physical principles that dictate how gases and liquids move. Taken altogether, this indicates that there is nothing special about the way organisms function; physiology and ecology are simply physics and chemistry writ complex. In a stimulating review, Lawton (1999) argued that ecology has no laws comparable to physics, but does have what he called widely observable tendencies. These provide a structure for ecology, but they cannot be deduced from first principles. The complication here is scale. At small scales organisms do things that can be analysed, understood and relatively…