3 ms·

Not directly related, but I find the aforementioned proportionality fascinating as I found recently that the cell size is critically bounded by it: "Therefore,

Not directly related, but I find the aforementioned proportionality fascinating as I found recently that the cell size is critically bounded by it: "Therefore, as a cell increases in size, its surface area-to-volume ratio decreases. [...] If the cell grows too large, the plasma membrane will not have sufficient surface area to support the rate of diffusion required for the increased volume. In other words, as a cell grows, it becomes less efficient. One way to become more efficient is to divide; another way is to develop organelles that perform specific tasks. These adaptations lead to the development of more sophisticated cells called eukaryotic cells." Source: https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_General_Biology/Book%3A_General_Biology_(Boundless)/4%3A_Cell_Structure/4.1%3A_Studying_Cells/4.1D%3A_Cell_Size https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_Gene...

twelfthnight 6y ago
Is this link your writing? It's very interesting!
- mushishi 6y ago
  No, unfortunately not! I am reading The Vital Question by Nick Lane, and he tells about the cell size in that book. After I noticed the parent comment (of mine), I just googled some reference to my point.
saeranv 6y ago
Is the area/volume constraint in space related to the one in organisms? The latter I can understand intuitively as a function of scaling metabolic rates for different organism sizes. Specifically, there's some power-law relationship between growing volume and area[1], which means you require proportionally more metabolism (energy production) as you get smaller because your surface heat loss is smaller, to maintain the same heat rate as a larger animal. I think there might be a rough analogy/relationship to space if we think of heat loss in terms of increasing entropy/loss-of-information, and the higher probability of low energy/low-information states in a volume over time? But, I don't have enough physics knowledge to know if this is the right way to think about it... [1] This is the rough intuition, but the actual exponent is not consistent with square-cube rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law.

twelfthnight 6y ago

Is this link your writing? It's very interesting!

mushishi 6y ago
No, unfortunately not! I am reading The Vital Question by Nick Lane, and he tells about the cell size in that book. After I noticed the parent comment (of mine), I just googled some reference to my point.

saeranv 6y ago

Is the area/volume constraint in space related to the one in organisms? The latter I can understand intuitively as a function of scaling metabolic rates for different organism sizes. Specifically, there's some power-law relationship between growing volume and area[1], which means you require proportionally more metabolism (energy production) as you get smaller because your surface heat loss is smaller, to maintain the same heat rate as a larger animal. I think there might be a rough analogy/relationship to space if we think of heat loss in terms of increasing entropy/loss-of-information, and the higher probability of low energy/low-information states in a volume over time? But, I don't have enough physics knowledge to know if this is the right way to think about it... [1] This is the rough intuition, but the actual exponent is not consistent with square-cube rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law.