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Allometric scaling is any change that deviates from isometry. A classic example discussed by Galileo in his Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences is the skeleton of mammals. The skeletal structure becomes much stronger and more robust relative to the size of the body as the body size increases. [13]
[5] Consequently, most animals show allometric scaling with increased size, both among species and within a species. The giant creatures seen in monster movies (e.g., Godzilla , King Kong , and Them! , and other kaiju ) are also unrealistic, given that their sheer size would force them to collapse.
Kleiber's law, like many other biological allometric laws, is a consequence of the physics and/or geometry of circulatory systems in biology. [5] Max Kleiber first discovered the law when analyzing a large number of independent studies on respiration within individual species. [2]
Allometric engineering is the process of experimentally shifting the scaling relationships, for body size or shape, in a population of organisms. More specifically, the process of experimentally breaking the tight covariance evident among component traits of a complex phenotype by altering the variance of one trait relative to another.
This page was last edited on 13 December 2010, at 13:01 (UTC).; Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; additional terms may apply.
(1) Scaling in Biology – Enquist is notable in biology for his work with Geoffrey West and James H. Brown, in understanding the origin and diversity of organismal form, function, and diversity by developing general models for the origin of allometry and scaling laws in biology.
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Because the proportionality constants β and the scaling exponents α are often denoted using Greek letters, it is desirable to use β as the proportionality coefficient versus α, since α could be misread as the symbol for "proportional". A well-known allometric equation relates metabolic rate to body mass: Y = βM 3/4.