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About this book
Scaling relationships are a persistent theme in biology. Examples include branching patterns of blood vessels, structural and functional correlates of body size, distribution of body size and abundance among species, and variations in populations within an area or over time. This book, based on a conference at the Santa Fe Institute, brings together many of the most prominent workers in the area to assess our current understanding of scaling relationships at the physiological, biomechanical, and ecological levels.
Contents
Scaling in biology - patterns and processes, causes and consequences; allometry and natural selection; hovering and jumping - contrasting problems in scaling; scaling of terrestrial support; consequences of size change during ontogeny and evolution; the origin of universal scaling laws in biology; scaling and invariants in cardiovascular biology; vascular system of the human heart; constrained constructive optimization of arterial tree models; quarter-power allometric scaling in vascular plants; twigs, trees, and the dynamics of carbon in the landscape; cell size, shape, and fitness in evolving populations of bacteria; does body size optimization alter the allometries for production and life history traits?; why and how phylogenetic relationships should be incorporated into studies of scaling; individual energy use and the allometry of population density; scaling in biology, from organisms to ecosystem; scaling and self-similarity in species distributions.
Customer Reviews
Proceedings Proceedings
Edited By: James H Brown and Geoffrey B West
352 pages, Bw plates, illus, figs, tabs
"I personally appreciate this volume because it represents genuine integrative biology--understanding system behavior from underlying principles and components. The viewpoint is frequently praised but seldom achieved in detail. This book is, in my opinion, an important contribution to quantitative biology and can be read and appreciated by both biologists and mathematicians."--Doody's