Molecules react to their environment

Le Chatelier’s principle is neither hard to state nor to understand. But it’s kind of hard to find the right words. It’s typically expressed as something like: ‘If a dynamic equilibrium is disturbed by changing the conditions, the position of equilibrium moves to counteract the change.’ But there is a clear implication of intentionality here: it’s as though the system is determined to keep its balance. ‘Adaptation to the environment’ has more than one meaning. It can refer to the gradual accommodation to a niche explained by natural selection in self-replicating systems, or to the instantaneous response to fluctuating environmental conditions due to physicochemical principles. These two processes interact, but one might have thought we could keep them distinct. After seeing a paper by Jordan Horowitz and Jeremy England of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, I’m not so sure.