Meta-knowledge
“The researchers’ analysis also shows that the rate of energy consumption per unit body mass declines with growing body size in groups of evolutionarily close organisms, such as mammals. For example, one gram of an elephant’s body uses up 25 times less energy than does one gram of a shrew’s body, accounting for why shrews have to eat more often than elephants. On the other hand, a bacterium, which is not closely related to an elephant in an evolutionary sense, consumes approximately the same energy per unit body mass as the elephant.â€
This interests me because it is an attempt to discover meta-knowledge that applies to a much larger set of detailed knowledge in specific domains. I believe such re-organization of information is necessary if there is to be any hope for a human to comprehend even a small fraction of the world’s knowledge. The world has so many stories that a person can only learn a few of the most powerful.Clearly such meta-knowledge has limits. That paragraph could be re-stated to say a shrew burns 25 times as much energy as a bacterium. So the meta-knowledge both captures important information and misses important information.
Yes, but is this a mere coincidence? What is the deep significance?
Life is not a fractal, in that it is not scale independent. It is also not simple function like the ratio of the volume of a sphere to its surface area. Like at atom, at different levels of size, different laws are dominant (strong forces between quarks, electromagnetic between atoms, gravity between planets). There is no one force or law applicable to “life”. Perhaps there’s an organism that has galaxies or universes as its “atoms”, and exists on a different time dimension? Or maybe I’ve had too many bong hits.
eric,
Oh I don’t know, the laws of thermodynamics are certainly applicable to all life. Which is what you’re seeing here — different metabolic coping strategies for fighting off entropy.