From ScienceDaily:
Limits to growth lie at the heart of how all living things function, according to a new study. The diversity of life is staggering. From microscopic algae to elephants, life has devised countless ways to thrive in every environment on the planet. But while biologists have tended to focus on the many varied forms that species have evolved, the age of ‘big data’ offers an unprecedented view of some surprisingly common features shared by all creatures, great and small.
A new paper, published this week in PNAS, brings together data from many thousands of studies to show that underlying the endless variety of living things, many of the most important features of life follow universal laws. The work, led by Ian Hatton at ICTA-UAB in Barcelona, shows how metabolism, abundance, growth and mortality all follow strikingly consistent relationships with body size from the tiniest bacteria to the blue whale.
“The fact that we find these simple mathematical relationships that span all life, points to some fundamental process at the heart of living systems that we don’t yet fully understand,” explains Hatton. …
“What is so astounding is that no matter where you look, no matter what kind of living system, everything seems to follow the same growth law,” says Hatton. “We can’t yet explain it, but we know it has deep implications.” Paper. (open access) – Ian A. Hatton, Andy P. Dobson, David Storch, Eric D. Galbraith, Michel Loreau. Linking scaling laws across eukaryotes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019; 201900492 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1900492116 More.
Abstract: Scaling laws relating body mass to species characteristics are among the most universal quantitative patterns in biology. Within major taxonomic groups, the 4 key ecological variables of metabolism, abundance, growth, and mortality are often well described by power laws with exponents near 3/4 or related to that value, a commonality often attributed to biophysical constraints on metabolism. However, metabolic scaling theories remain widely debated, and the links among the 4 variables have never been formally tested across the full domain of eukaryote life, to which prevailing theory applies. Here we present datasets of unprecedented scope to examine these 4 scaling laws across all eukaryotes and link them to test whether their combinations support theoretical expectations. We find that metabolism and abundance scale with body size in a remarkably reciprocal fashion, with exponents near ±3/4 within groups, as expected from metabolic theory, but with exponents near ±1 across all groups. This reciprocal scaling supports “energetic equivalence” across eukaryotes, which hypothesizes that the partitioning of energy in space across species does not vary significantly with body size. In contrast, growth and mortality rates scale similarly both within and across groups, with exponents of ±1/4. These findings are inconsistent with a metabolic basis for growth and mortality scaling across eukaryotes. We propose that rather than limiting growth, metabolism adjusts to the needs of growth within major groups, and that growth dynamics may offer a viable theoretical basis to biological scaling.
They don’t quite say that this is evidence for structuralism. But it sounds like evidence for structuralism.
“The fact that we find these simple mathematical relationships that span all life, points to some fundamental process at the heart of living systems that we don’t yet fully understand,”
Hmm…
Of related note:
Natural Selection, i.e. the supposed ‘designer substitute, (since it supposedly ‘selects’ on the 3-Dimensional level of the entire organism), simply cannot explain quarter power scaling. As the following article states, “A longstanding puzzle in biology is why the exponent b is usually some simple multiple of 1/4 (4-Dimensional scaling) rather than a multiple of 1/3, as would be expected from Euclidean (3-Dimensional) scaling.”
As Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini explain in their book, “What Darwin Got Wrong”, “The conclusion here is inescapable, that the driving force for these invariant scaling laws cannot have been natural selection. It’s inconceivable that so many different organisms, spanning different kingdoms and phyla, may have blindly ‘tried’ all sorts of power laws and that only those that have by chance ‘discovered’ the one-quarter power law reproduced and thrived.”
The reason why these universal and as uniquely biological ’4-Dimensional’ quarter power scaling laws are impossible for Darwinian evolution to explain is that Natural Selection operates at the 3-Dimensional level of the organism and the ’4-Dimensional’ quarter power scaling law are simply ‘invisible’ to natural selection. The reason why 4-Dimensional things are, for all practical purposes, completely invisible to 3-Dimensional things is best demonstrated by the illustration of ‘flatland’:
And the reason why life is found to be based on 4-Dimensional principles rather than on 3-Dimensional principles, (as would be expected if natural selection were true), is because life is constrained to be so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium by immaterial information.
For example, the information content that is found to be in a simple one cell bacterium, when working from the thermodynamic perspective, is found to be around 10 to the 12 bits,,,
And indeed, immaterial information is now shown to be a physically real entity that is separate from matter and energy and is also shown to have a quote/unquote ‘thermodynamic content’.
In 2010 the Maxwell’s demon thought experiment, which was originally devised by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867, was finally experimentally realized. As the following paper highlights, it has now been experimentally demonstrated that knowledge of a particle’s location and/or position converts information into energy.
And as the following 2010 article stated about the preceding experiment, “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,”
And as the following 2017 article states: James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,,
quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,,
Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
Again to repeat that last sentence,“Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
That statement about entropy being a property of an observer who describes the system, for anyone involved in the ID vs. Darwinism debate, ought to send chills down their scientific spine.
Simply put, these developments go to the very heart of the ID vs. Evolution debate and directly falsify, number one, Darwinian claims that immaterial information is merely ’emergent’ from some material basis. And number two, these experimental realizations of the Maxwell’s demon thought experiment go even further and also directly validate a primary claim from ID proponents that an Intelligent Designer who imparts information into a biological system is necessary in order to circumvent the second law.
Moreover, in regards to immaterial consciousness itself, (as compared to immaterial information), the following article states, “Brain is one of the most energy demanding organs in mammals, and its total metabolic rate scales with brain volume raised to a power of around 5/6. This value is significantly higher than the more common exponent 3/4 (4- dimensional Quarter Power Scaling) relating whole body resting metabolism with body mass and several other physiological variables in animals and plants.,,,”
Since natural selection operates on the 3-Dimensional level of the entire organism, and therefore cannot possibly ‘see’ the immaterial information that is constraining life to 4-Dimensional parameters, then it is that much more ludicrous to presuppose that natural selection, (in so far that natural selection can even be said to exist as a causal power in the first place), could possibly ‘see’ something that is operating on ‘6 Dimensional’ parameters. The most parsimonious explanation for such a optimal, 6 Dimensional, constraint on the brain’s metabolic activity is that the material brain was designed, first and foremost, to house the immaterial mind and give the immaterial mind the most favorable metabolic environment at all times.
Quote and verse:
“They don’t quite say that this is evidence for structuralism. But it sounds like evidence for structuralism.”
Certainly supports the structuralism idea far better than the evolutionary paradigm!
Creation.com recently published an interesting article on Developmental Gene Networks that has relevance here:
https://creation.com/developmental-gene-regulatory-networks
The evidence for Darwinism just keeps dwindling/getting weaker.