So Simple a Beginning by Raghuveer Parthasarathy

Author:Raghuveer Parthasarathy
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

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The realization that animals’ sizes, forms, and activities are all interrelated, and that these relationships are often set by the physical forces manifest in the environment, gives us deep insights into the natural world. There’s a unity to all the bovids in their elastic similarity, for example, that’s even more profound than their superficial similarities would imply. The back-and-forth swaying of a shark’s tail is a testament to its liberation from the fluid constraints that apply to smaller creatures. The repeated emergence of scaling relationships as we study the living world across its wide range of sizes elevates the notion of scaling to a broad guiding theme. Scaling concepts provide a coherence that unifies the diversity of animal shapes and behaviors. Scaling also helps explain why such diversity exists, as organisms evolve amid physical forces whose manifestations and magnitudes are different at different sizes. In the next chapter, we focus on scaling issues related to surfaces, especially the challenges of breathing.

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