You are welcome! I have now estimated the total welfare of animal populations, trees, and bacteria and archaea assuming individual welfare per fully-healthy-organism-year is proportional to “metabolic energy consumption per unit time at rest”^”exponent”. I had recommended research informing how to increase the welfare of soil animals, but I am now more pessimistic about this. I currently think it is better to focus on decreasing the uncertainty about how the individual welfare per unit time of different organisms and digital systems compares with that of humans.
In addition, in allometry, “the study of the relationship of body size to shape,[1]anatomy, physiology and behaviour”, “The relationship between the two measured quantities is often expressed as a power law equation (allometric equation)”.
From the book “Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies” by Geoffrey West:
This scaling law for metabolic rate [this one], known as Kleiber’s law after the biologist who first articulated it, is valid across almost all taxonomic groups, including mammals, birds, fish, crustacea, bacteria, plants, and cells [see this section of my linkpost for further discussion]. Even more impressive, however, is that similar scaling laws hold for essentially all physiological quantities and life-history events, including growth rate, heart rate, evolutionary rate, genome length, mitochondrial density, gray matter in the brain, life span, the height of trees and even the number of their leaves. Furthermore, when plotted logarithmically this dizzying array of scaling laws all look like Figure 1 and therefore have the same mathematical structure. They are all “power laws” and are typically governed by an exponent (the slope of the graph), which is a simple multiple of ¼, the classic example being the ¾ for metabolic rate. So, for example, if the size of a mammal is doubled, its heart rate decreases by about 25 percent. The number 4 therefore plays a fundamental and almost magically universal role in all of life.13
Footnote 13:
There are several excellent texts summarizing the various allometric scaling laws in biology. Among them are: W. A. Calder, Size, Function and Life History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); E. L. Charnov, Life History Invariants (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1993); T. A. McMahon and J. T. Bonner, On Size and Life (New York: Scientific American Library, 1983); R. H. Peters, The Ecological Implications of Body Size (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986); K. Schmidt-Nielsen, Why Is Animal Size So Important? (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Tables 1, 2, and 3 of chapter 4 have lots of predicted and observed allometric equations.
Thanks for explaining!
You are welcome! I have now estimated the total welfare of animal populations, trees, and bacteria and archaea assuming individual welfare per fully-healthy-organism-year is proportional to “metabolic energy consumption per unit time at rest”^”exponent”. I had recommended research informing how to increase the welfare of soil animals, but I am now more pessimistic about this. I currently think it is better to focus on decreasing the uncertainty about how the individual welfare per unit time of different organisms and digital systems compares with that of humans.
From the book “Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies” by Geoffrey West:
Footnote 13:
Tables 1, 2, and 3 of chapter 4 have lots of predicted and observed allometric equations.