On Thu, 26 Oct 2006, Richard Emery wrote: > To Guy and Bob (Hi, Bob!):
Hiya Rich! Good to make contact again! > Just off hand, I can think of three biological "laws" worth > mentioning here: Well taken. The imnportant qualifier to Elsasser's treatment is "in the same sense as the laws of physics." That is, they depend on the continuum nature of time-space. That doesn't seem to apply to the laws that you suggest. > 1. Cope's Law?"Structurally ordained biases of speciation away from a > lower size limit occupied by founding members of the clade, rather than > adaptive anagenesis towards organismal benefits of large size" (Gould, > 2002), which is to say that a clade's body size will increase naturally > with increasing speciation activity. This "law" might be construed as > equivalent to the Second Law, wherein entropy must increase with more > thermodynamic activity. In my own (perverse) imagination, I might even > say that Cope's Law could be equivalent to Bob U's "ascendency > hypothesis," referring to flow bits of carbon (information) in > ecological networks (Bob, am I off the mark here?). I think it pertains to the increase of "overhead" (dissipative overhead, to be precise.) Of course, I could have included my principle of increasing ascendency as a putative law, but I don't see it as a law per-se. I see it as derivative of a process -- the autocatalytic process to be precise. I suspect the same might apply to the "laws" you cite. It's just that I'm not a good enough biologist to put my finger on the underlying processes. The best, Bob ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Robert E. Ulanowicz | Tel: (410) 326-7266 Chesapeake Biological Laboratory | FAX: (410) 326-7378 P.O. Box 38 | Email <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 1 Williams Street | Web <http://www.cbl.umces.edu/~ulan> Solomons, MD 20688-0038 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ fis mailing list [email protected] http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
