Re: Master Equation for all life processes?

[Judith Rosen <***>]

Hey Steve,

Thank you for posting that! It was fascinating reading. Many impressions and reactions to report, but the main, over-riding one is satisfaction that it is a PROCESS-- in fact; one of the two processes RR saw as being necessary for life-- which is used as the basis of their scaling efforts. That means they are studying aspects of the process, rather than studying a list of material/particulate ingredients (which is the usual result of reducing the process down to a study of the material structure in which the process appears to take place). And, even though they apparently don't recognize it as such, they are also using metabolic rate as a new measure of time, rather than "clock time" (which I equate to an incomplete, superficial, human-scaled, human perception of time). So, what they are ultimately doing is finding mathematical equations for scaling aspects of metabolic "time" into human terms. In doing so, they have found certain patterns of entailment which have to do with the relation between surface area and volume, or the relation of two dimensions to three dimensions, within any living system's organization. So, does this define these three entities (surface area/two dimensionality, volume/three dimensionality, and the relation between them) as being among the known components of living system organization? I would say so.

I think it's also the case that the relation between surface area and many other aspects of any given system can be full of entailments. Consider the difference between a coastline ecosystem that is smooth and straight... and a coastline which undulates in and out into many small coves and inlets. This is also the same kind of relation that makes all the difference between solid rock and the basis for soil (including a soil ecosystem). It's the difference between a block of solid ice and an equivalent mass of frozen water as snowfall. Because of this sort of relation, two quantities of material which are identical at the atomic level can behave entirely differently from one another at other scales (say, of mass, volume, etc.). Similarly, two quantities of material that are different at the atomic level can behave identically to each other at other scales, because of relational impacts. Once example would be the fact that many different gasses are flamable. Another example, this time in functional terms, would be the fact that blood based on copper serves the same functional purpose as blood based on iron: circulation. It seems to me that living systems exploit these facts to great benefit and this is also why it is necessary to incorporate relational techniques and approaches into scientific exploration.

My main criticism of the work described in the article is that while they are indeed using relational approaches and creating techniques based on them... they are not aware of the striking difference between what they are doing and the accepted scientific approach. In other words; this will not generate any changes to the foundations of science or enlarge the paradigm because they don't seem to be looking at what it (their achievement) means in relation to science. I think they should, because their entire achievement could be dismissed on precisely those foundational grounds, as my father found out when he began to question those grounds.

Judith
















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BioTheory: An electronic journal of general science based on the Relational (Rosennean) Complexity Paradigm
On Dec 26, 2005, at 3:15 PM, Steve Johnson wrote:

> A story on Science News:
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> 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:
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> Ecology's big, hot idea: 
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> http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=535575
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> http://www.primidi.com/2005/02/21.html
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> http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050212/bob9.asp
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>
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