Mathematical Model of Animal Growth Reveals Life is Defined By Biology, Not Physics

Monash College scientists have tested the conventional wisdom that biological patterns are explained by physical restrictions.

In a study released today in Scientific research, the researchers offer their mathematical model of animal development, which describes how animals devote energy to growth and reproduction as they age and increase in size.

“Despite the fact that living organisms can not damage the laws of physics, development has shown itself to be astonishingly proficient at discovering loopholes,” stated lead research author Professor Craig White from the Monash College School of Biological Sciences and the Center for Geometric Biology.

An inexplicable issue in biology worries the non-proportional (allometric) connection between energy metabolism and size.

“Discovering that an animal’s metabolism can be explained without invoking physical constraints indicates that we’ve been searching in the incorrect place when it comes to finding answers for why this widespread pattern happens,” Professor White stated.

“We believe that physical constraints do not drive as much of the biology that we see as formerly meant, and that development has a bigger range of options than formerly believed,” he stated.

An increase in size during growth or development is usually accompanied by a less-than-proportional rise in energy needs such that, when compared gram-for-gram, big animals burn less energy and need less food than small ones.

For example, tiny mammals such as shrews could require to consume as much as 3 times their body weight in food each day, whereas the largest– baleen whales– eat simply 5– 30% of their body weight in krill each day.

“Our research study argues against the conventional wisdom that biological patterns such as allometric scaling occur due to physical constraints,” stated Professor White.

“We developed a mathematical model of animal development that defines how animals shift their energy allocation from growth to recreation as they increase in age and dimension, and reveal that lifetime reproduction is maximized when metabolism scales out of proportion with size,” he stated.

“Many models presented since the early 19th century have utilized physical or geometric restrictions to explain this pattern, but ours does not. Simply put, classic concepts argued that animals have the metabolism they have because they must; we discover they have the metabolism they have because it’s the best.”

Professor White said the research study showed that allometric scaling does not need to be a result of physical or geometric limitations. Instead, natural selection, not physics, favors allometric scaling.

Read the original article on Technology Times.