Michael Alexander sent along this excerpt from Steven Johnson’s book, “Where Good Ideas Come From.”
Scientists and animal lovers had long observed that as life gets bigger, it slows down. Flies live for hours or days; elephants live for half-centuries. The hearts of birds and small mammals pump blood much faster than those of giraffes and blue whales.
But the relationship between size and speed didn’t seem to be a linear one. A horse might be five hundred times heavier than a rabbit, yet its pulse certainly wasn’t five hundred times slower than the rabbit’s. After a formidable series of measurements in his Davis lab, [Swiss scientist Max] Kleiber discovered that this scaling phenomenon stuck to an unvarying mathematical script called ‘negative quarter-power scaling.’
If you plotted mass versus metabolism on a logarithmic grid, the result was a perfectly straight line that led from rats and pigeons all the way up to bulls and hippopotami. … The more species Kleiber and his peers analyzed, the clearer the equation became: metabolism scales to mass to the negative quarter power….
To read the full, original article click on this link: Kleiber’s Law: Growth and Creativity in Cities « Price Tags
