language parallax

Just got a couple of links from the U. Michigan CSRG mailing list:

All Creatures Great and Small

Ecology’s Big Hot Idea

From the second:

Wouldn’t it be good if there were a simple theory that used life’s shared fundamentals to explain its large- scale regularities, via its diversity of individuals? In the past few years, a team of ecologists and physicists have come up with just such a theory. At its heart is metabolism: the way life uses energy is, they claim, a unifying principle for ecology in the same way that genetics underpins evolutionary biology.

Apparently it’s well-established that Metabolic rate = mass ^ (0.73)

The new contribution:

In West, Brown, and Enquist’s model, the maximally efficient network that serves every part of a body has a fractal structure, showing the same geometry at different scales. And the number of uniform terminal units in such a network—and so the rate at which resources are delivered to the cells—is proportional to the three-quarter power of body mass.