Biological math (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, February 18, 2014, 15:35 (3931 days ago)
edited by unknown, Tuesday, February 18, 2014, 15:57

It seems everything can be reduced to math formulas: Kleiber's law of metabolism and mass has been shown to be true. Now blood circulation has been fitted to another formula, as a measure of heat control:-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140217161106.htm-"The UMD and University of Padua researchers argue a crucial variable has been overlooked: the speed at which nutrients are carried throughout the animals' bodies and heat is carried away. So the team members calculated the rate at which animals' hearts pump blood and found that the velocity of blood flow was equal to the animals' mass to the one-twelfth power."-"The information was there all along, but its significance had been overlooked," said hydrologist Andrea Rinaldo of Italy's University of Padua and Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale. "Animals need to adjust the flow of nutrients and heat as their mass changes to maintain the greatest possible energy efficiency. That is why animals need a pump ... a heart ... and trees do not."
 
"Plugging that information into their equation, the researchers found they had attained a complete explanation for Kleiber's Law.
 
"An elegant answer sometimes is the right one, and there's an elegance to this in the sense that it uses very simple geometric arguments," said physicist Amos Maritan of the University of Padua. "It doesn't call for any specialized structures. It has very few preconditions. You have these two lineages, plants and animals, that are very different and they arrive at the same conclusion. That is what's called convergent evolution, and the stunning result is that it's being driven by the underlying physics and the underlying math." (my bold)- Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-02-evolution-geometries-life-scientists-longstanding.html#jCp