That's a fair point-- a naive hypothesis based only on heat dissipation won't predict the correct exponent. My criticism was basically mostly about the lack of

That's a fair point-- a naive hypothesis based only on heat dissipation won't predict the correct exponent. My criticism was basically mostly about the lack of citations in the article to all the earlier people who have thought about these problems, as well as the idea that finding patterns in biological or anthropological data was somehow new and revolutionary. Maybe the article snipped a lot of the context of Dr. West's own writings-- that would be typical for science journalism.