Why do big [animals]… use up energy more slowly?
Three scientists at the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary institute in northern New Mexico, took up this question a few years ago and discovered that if you compare elephants to lions to housecats to mice to shrews, you discover that heartbeats vary in a precise mathematical way.
The mathematical principal is called Quarter Power Scaling and it is described beautifully in “Of Mice and Elephants: A Matter of Scale,” by New York Times writer George Thompson. But here is the heart of it: Nature goes easy on larger creatures so they don’t wear out too quickly.
After all, an elephant has trillions more cells than a shrew and they all have to connect and communicate and distribute energy and keep the animal going. In a little animal, the job is easier. In a big animal, there are so many more blood vessels, moving parts, longer pathways, there is so much more work to do, the big animal could break down much more quickly.
So Geoffrey West, Jim Brown and Brian Enquist discovered that nature gives larger animals a gift: more efficient cells. Literally.
NO! NO! NO! – it’s all random, I tell you! 😉
This is absolutely fascinating and fabulous. Be sure to read the article by Thompson linked in the article, which provides a wealth of information.
It is appropriate that such research is being done at the Santa Fe Institute. One of its major researchers, Stuart Kauffman, has been a leading theorist in the field of emergent complexity.
Whiile at the ASA/CiS Joint meeting in Edinburgh this August I heard evolutionary biologist (and evangelical Christian) Simon Conway Morris give a lecture on recent research stemming from the discovery of deep structures in evolutionary processes that suggest a directionality to selection that was missed by scientists in the past. Perhaps this mathematical pattern of size/heartbeat/longevity is an example of such a deep structure.
Over the entrance to Plato’s Academy was the inscription: “God is always doing geometry.” It appears (once again!) that Plato was on to something.