As usual, read the paper instead [0]. It's short, clear, and easy to read. In particular, it applies only to plants, so the article's musings about jellyfish an

As usual, read the paper instead [0]. It's short, clear, and easy to read. In particular, it applies only to plants, so the article's musings about jellyfish and elephants is off the mark and even addressed in the paper [1]. So is the irrelevant discussion of "pulse", which is oddly supported with video that is just played forward and backward. The paper just claims to support some known, quantifiable correlations with some data. The correlations pertain to mortality rates and birth rates, and certainly suggests no formula for when to die, or causation of any sort for that matter. E.g, is it that bigger plants die less often, or that plants that die less often can get bigger? Does it matter? [0] http://www.pnas.org/content/104/40/15777.full http://www.pnas.org/content/104/40/15777.full [1] "Whereas the action of selective processes on animal lifespan cannot extend through their entire lifespan because many lose reproductive capacity with age, this is not the case in plants, which generally remain reproductive throughout their lifespan, suggesting that lifespan could be under greater selective pressure in plants."