Talk:Kleiber's law

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Though this article seems to be quite enlightening on the subject, statements like "It is truly unfortunate that it is not well understood even by its own foremost proponents" have no place in an encyclopedia, do not present any new data and may prejudice a readers opinion.

Furthermore in the 6th to last paragraph there were many claims made about the usefulness of Kleiber's law with no supporting evidence or references. For example: "This equation explains why exercise results in longer life, why over-eating results in shorter life, why stem cells proliferate and why they stop as they differentiate. This equation explains why cancer cells proliferate, and how to get them to destroy themselves."

I'd love to put one of those warnings at the top of the page but I don't know how...

Biledemon 20:18, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, Biledemon, the entry you object to and would caution others about, i.e., the usefulness of Kleiber's Law, would be more clear to you if you ran the numbers and did the graphs, then studied them both very closely. Although this has been done by the author, the material is not yet published, and may never be, because the interpretation of Kleiber's Law most widely disseminated is that of its major proponents who apparently have neither run the numbers nor studied the graphs. Wikipedia allows for the introduction of different treatments of the subject that are excluded from the accepted wisdom because of the lack of affiliation of their authors. So we have reputed 'experts' on the subject making statements that suggest their understanding is incomplete. For example see the discussion of West et al. published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences in 2002 in which they clearly state that the equation may hold the secrets to the aging process, and then go on to assert that metabolic rate is entirely mass dependent so that a rat and a pigeon of the same mass have the same metabolic rate. By so doing they remove the equation from having any relevance to the aging process. You can google the names of these people and find out what they have written. That's what the internet is for. Certainly some of the statements have no place in the old style encyclopedia, as you say, but the world has changed. Scientific knowledge is not carved in stone, although there is a Central Dogma of Biology from Watson and Crick, something that has no place in science. Wikipedia is a convenient forum for ideas which evades the ossification of academia, and which feeds the thinking of the new guys who otherwise would not know anything more about the subject except what is in the text which they have learned to never question. At the end of the entry is my email address informing the reader that further details are available on the subject. Why didn't you ask? 66.215.123.233 00:13, 3 March 2007 (UTC) Gregory O'Kelly

[edit] wikified!

I did some wikification of the article, but I think it still needs some work. Also, maybe the biography section should be moved to a separate article?

Jdrice8 06:10, 14 October 2007 (UTC)