Title Author Date

Noah's Ark Rossow, Amiel Apr 25, 2005

Dear Mike,

I must apologize - my curiosity has led to that exchange of messages - not the first time - and I had no intention to argue against your
horse-related comment. You are probably right in that the mean mass of an animal is somewhere to the left of the horse's mass on the "number of species vs body mass" plot. However, as you said, this can't change the overall conclusion regarding the implausibiliity of the bibliical story if all the food mass is accounted for, etc, so if creos will try to dispute my
conclusion based on the argument you have offered, I'll be able to counter it. None of them ever mentioned my essay since its posting in 1999 and most probably they will not do so in the future. Anyway, thanks for your messages
and best wishes.

AR.

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Title Author Date

Power law Elsberry, Wesley R. Apr 25, 2005

There are certainly some general scaling trends in biology concerning size and metabolism that may be described in terms of "power law" or
"power function". But these are not exact relations. Biology is usually a lot messier than people coming from physics or chemistry like to admit.

So far as I know, there is no simple relation between "body size" and "number of species", and certainly not a generally known result with
scaling of the sort stated by your correspondent.

Wesley

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