A Secret Mathematical Unity to Life

Join the discussion
Registration is free. Ask a follow-up in this thread, or start your own.
Sign up Log in
1 reply · 3K views
LeoYard
Messages
16
Reaction score
0
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
http://hep.ucsb.edu/courses/ph6b_99/0111299sci-scaling.html


what ramifications this new quarter-power scaling theory will have on the field overall?
 
Physics news on Phys.org
It's has no ramifications whatsoever, because it doesn't hold true. It's convenient they selected some species that fit along some pattern, but if they expanded their search just a bit further, they'd find plenty of exceptions. For example, the breed of sheep I work with weight about the same as an adult human, and their heart rate is about the same, but they have a MUCH shorter lifespan. Likewise, a horse weighs about 10 times that, yet only lives one-third to half as long as an average human, but about 3-4 times as long as a sheep.

It's hardly a new theory anyway. As it is, the article you cited is from 1999. There is a relationship between body size and heart rate, as physiology pretty much demands this, but nothing nearly so precise as that article would lead you to believe.