Re: Master Equation for all life processes?

[Dan Fiscus <***>]

Steve,

This stuff has been around a long time. It does
intrigue me and I think it deeply important, but
the missing aspect to me is that Jim Brown,
Enquist, West and others who worked on this a lot
treat the scaling as if organisms all developed
these power law relations in isolation. In fact,
they all co-evolved and require an ecological
network for their context and inter-connected
webs of support, recycling, energy flow and
co-construction. The lynch pin I think is needed
and I have worked on it some is to integrate the
power law scalings of abiotic and semi-biotic
realms like C and N in soils. Now we have the
same scalings in three interdepenendent realms -
composers (autotrophs, metabolizers), decomposers
(heterotrophis, repairers) and soils (repair of
repair).

Some thoughts...

Dan

>
>  A story on Science News:
>
>
>  Science News recently wrote that some simple mathematical equations,
> known as quarter-power scaling laws, can explain the metabolic rates of
> living organisms. For example, "an animal's metabolic rate appears to be
> proportional to mass to the 3/4 power." And this "3/4-power law appears
> to hold sway from microbes to whales, creatures of sizes ranging over a
> mind-boggling 21 orders of magnitude."
>
>  Here are full text links:
>
>  Ecology's big, hot idea:
>
>  http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=535575
>
>  http://www.primidi.com/2005/02/21.html
>
>  http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050212/bob9.asp
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
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