Exploding Elephants
A fun holiday thread. For those who don't know, Kurzgesagt ('in a nutshell' in German), is probably one of the best educational channels on Youtube, and their latest video, on exploding elephants, is a treat:
[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUWUHf-rzks[/video]
What I want to explore, on the back of the video, are some of the philosophical lessons that can be drawn from it. In particular, what I'd like to bring out is the anti-Platonic lesson that the video implies. The idea is this: that form and function are intimately related, and that form cannot be thought about in any way separately from the immanent conditions which shape it. The 'form' we're talking about here of course, is size.
As the video points out, the size of an elephant and the size of a mouse are not simply incidental: we cannot blow the mouse up to the size of an elephant or shrink an elephant down to the size of a mouse without killing either. And this has to do with the different metabolic rates of each respective animal - the mouse, on account of it's tiny size, needs a rapid metabolic rate to stop it from literally freezing to death, while the elephant, on account of it's large size, needs a slow metabolic rate in order to not overheat itself to death.
'Form', or size in this case, cannot be thought of as transcendentally imposed on some indifferent 'substrate' of material or 'matter': both must be thought of as imminently co-arising from processes of evolution (in the case of living things, anyway). In fact, the example from the video only begins to touch the wide and wonderful world of 'size', which is an under-explored area rich with philosophically interesting resources.
Take the further example of the field of gravitational biology, for instance. This is the study of gravity and it's effects on life. For a awesome introduction, check out J. B. S. Haldane's wonderful 6 page paper On Being the Right Size [pdf]. For Haldane, and indeed the entire field of gravitational biology, gravity has been one of the biggest constraints on the size and shape of animals: the reason that no land animal is as big as a whale, for instance, is because whales don't have to support their massive weight on account of living in water, whose bouyancy enables whales to grow to the giant sizes they do. And if giants remain the stuff of fantasy, it's because they'd have to contend - probably unsuccessfully - with gravity. Giants don't unfortunately make much engineering sense.
These are only but a few examples of how form and function and intimately connected, and many more can be provided. Perhaps a nice way to sum much much of the above is in D'Arcy Thompson's famous statement (from 'On Growth and Form') that form is a diagram of forces: that all form is reflective of the forces which work upon it, which bring it into being and sustain it. In the case of our exploding elephant/freezing mouse, form reflects the the kind of metabolism that each animal can possess. These are all just some very cursory illustrations, but hopefully they bring out the poverty of thinking that form can in any way be thought of in any kind of transcendent manner, and that no Idea of Form can explain morphogenesis (the 'genesis of form' ('morph?' in Greek)), but that morphogenesis is what explains form.
[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUWUHf-rzks[/video]
What I want to explore, on the back of the video, are some of the philosophical lessons that can be drawn from it. In particular, what I'd like to bring out is the anti-Platonic lesson that the video implies. The idea is this: that form and function are intimately related, and that form cannot be thought about in any way separately from the immanent conditions which shape it. The 'form' we're talking about here of course, is size.
As the video points out, the size of an elephant and the size of a mouse are not simply incidental: we cannot blow the mouse up to the size of an elephant or shrink an elephant down to the size of a mouse without killing either. And this has to do with the different metabolic rates of each respective animal - the mouse, on account of it's tiny size, needs a rapid metabolic rate to stop it from literally freezing to death, while the elephant, on account of it's large size, needs a slow metabolic rate in order to not overheat itself to death.
'Form', or size in this case, cannot be thought of as transcendentally imposed on some indifferent 'substrate' of material or 'matter': both must be thought of as imminently co-arising from processes of evolution (in the case of living things, anyway). In fact, the example from the video only begins to touch the wide and wonderful world of 'size', which is an under-explored area rich with philosophically interesting resources.
Take the further example of the field of gravitational biology, for instance. This is the study of gravity and it's effects on life. For a awesome introduction, check out J. B. S. Haldane's wonderful 6 page paper On Being the Right Size [pdf]. For Haldane, and indeed the entire field of gravitational biology, gravity has been one of the biggest constraints on the size and shape of animals: the reason that no land animal is as big as a whale, for instance, is because whales don't have to support their massive weight on account of living in water, whose bouyancy enables whales to grow to the giant sizes they do. And if giants remain the stuff of fantasy, it's because they'd have to contend - probably unsuccessfully - with gravity. Giants don't unfortunately make much engineering sense.
These are only but a few examples of how form and function and intimately connected, and many more can be provided. Perhaps a nice way to sum much much of the above is in D'Arcy Thompson's famous statement (from 'On Growth and Form') that form is a diagram of forces: that all form is reflective of the forces which work upon it, which bring it into being and sustain it. In the case of our exploding elephant/freezing mouse, form reflects the the kind of metabolism that each animal can possess. These are all just some very cursory illustrations, but hopefully they bring out the poverty of thinking that form can in any way be thought of in any kind of transcendent manner, and that no Idea of Form can explain morphogenesis (the 'genesis of form' ('morph?' in Greek)), but that morphogenesis is what explains form.
Comments (54)
What makes you say the latter, that beyond immanent conditions form is not shaped?
My opinion is that what is at issue here is the nature of matter. It is not properly an issue of form, though it may be best described as an issue of the relationship between matter and form. Matter, or energy, is how we understand the temporal continuity of existence. The common place perspective seems to be that matter is some sort of tiny indivisible particle which make up all objects. But this is a misunderstanding, because matter is really the thing which allows any size of an object to have temporal continuity, as the object which it is. Since matter is just this one fundamental principle of temporal continuity, then all the matter of a big object, and all the matter of a small object, must be exactly the same in relation to the object's form, which is what the object is.
What the video clip shows is that there is a strange relationship between the inside of an object, and the outside of an object. The matter of the object is an internal property rather than external, so temporal continuity (which expresses the existence of an object) is different from where there is no object (no expression of temporal continuity). Now when matter is expressed as a quantity, a size (a form), an exponential relationship develops between what is of the object and what is not of the object, due to the fact that real temporal continuity is of the object, and not of the surrounding "space" which is a conceptual construct. So, when this relationship with respect to a big object is compared to this relationship with respect to a small object, the difference is revealed significant, and very strange, by the exponential values. The difference referred to here, being the difference between the temporal extension of a real object, and the temporal extension of the assumed surrounding space (conceptual temporal extension). But the exposed strangeness here, in this relationship, is completely the result of quantifying matter (temporal extension), representing it as a form.
What we can conclude is that although we can refer to temporal continuity with the one term, "matter", or "energy", the temporal continuity of a very tiny object is completely different from the temporal continuity of a very large object. The relationship between these two is very strange. And when we try to express this relationship in terms of form, (quantify this relationship), we do not have the tools necessary, because we do not properly understand how the temporal continuity of a large object relates to the temporal continuity of a small object.. And this is exactly what quantum mechanics has already demonstrated to us, that how we understand the temporal continuity of a larger object is inadequate for understanding the temporal continuity of very tiny objects..
The material ontology consisting of inert, amorphous matter substrate as a distinct existent, with form and/or animating spirit or force or process acting on it as another distinct component of existence is both ancient and surprisingly ubiquitous and persistent. For example, ancient materialists, who you would not think of as natural allies of Plato, also believed something like this. And this sort of thinking is still current.
Of course, proponents of this view would not be much discouraged by your exploding elephant - they would just push "matter" to lower, sub-cellular scales (as, of course, has long since been done in the normal process of scientific reductionism).
Another thing that this video reminded me of (again): You often hear people say how machine-like biological mechanisms appear to be - surely, a hallmark of design! I think this is just a superficial impression that is an artifact of the way we analyze and present scientific models, which is like engineering in reverse (or reverse engineering). The impression I get is the opposite. When you look at living things with an unprejudiced eye, as well as when you learn the bewildering array of biological facts, such as those described in the video, it strikes you just how messy and complicated and thoroughly alien these things are. They are so obviously not designed by anything like a human designer*, but grown, evolved through billions of generations across billions of individuals in a blind and unthinking, but massively integrated process: integrated across all physical scales, all the way to the bio-chemical and even quantum mechanical level.
And what role does this inert, formless "matter" play in all this? It seems like a useless kludge, and we should rid our thinking of it.
* And it's no use saying that the designer is totally unlike a human designer: that just removes any reason for inferring design in the first place.
This is exactly the problem, how is matter scaled? By its defining terms, it cannot be scaled because an object's form is always what is measured.
Quoting SophistiCat
As I explained, "matter" accounts for the temporal continuity of existence. You can replace "matter" with "energy", but this does not make the problem go away, it just reaffirms it, as is evident in quantum mechanics.
Here's a link to an essay by Stephen Jay Gould that covers some of the same ground and goes beyond it a bit:
http://qrc.depaul.edu/djabon/CTTI/Readings/Gould_Size_and_Shape.pdf
You have taken something that seems really interesting and non-intuitive but simple into something incomprehensible. The issue that the video is discussing is one of the most important in physics - classical physics, in this case, not quantum - the scaling relation between geometry and force or energy. It's simple because it all comes down to basic geometry. It's non-intuitive because such seemingly small differences have such profound impacts on what forms are possible.
For me, there has always been a more general theme in this subject - It doesn't take magic or gee whiz quantum shenanigans to make simple things act in complex and unexpected ways.
Yep, exactly - the entire hylomorphic schema inherited from antiquity - determinate form descending upon inert and ready matter - needs to be shot out into space, never to return again. While I think you're right our hylomorphic enthusiast would simply scale-down, I suspect the problem he will run into is that at a certain level he will simply lose the very phenomena he means to explain: form.
Quoting SophistiCat
Again, yes! Part of what at stake here is precisely the way in which constraints like size, gravity, heat, and surface area do so much of the 'heavy lifting' of 'design' that any need to posit some kind of singular 'engineer' behind it all can only come off as ridiculous. Behind the divergent paths of the mouse and elephant lie the same physical-chemical principles that quite obviously were harnessed by evolutionary processes in ways distinct to each, as their phylogenetic paths played out in real time. I just finished reading, not too long ago, Peter Hoffman's Life's Ratchet, where, after looking at a whole range of exquisitely 'engineered' molecular 'machines' (operating quite obviously at a way different scale from what are discussing), he ends up drawing the same conclusion:
"Looking at molecular machines has made me realize that evolution is the only way these machines could have come to exist. As we have seen, life exploits all aspects of the physical world to the fullest: time and space, random thermal motion, the chemistry of carbon, chemical bonding, the properties of water. Designed machines are different. they are often based on a limited set of physical properties and are designed to resist any extraneous influences. the tendency of molecular machines to use chaos rather than resist it, provides a strong case for evolution ... The ability of life to somehow incorporate thermal randomness as an integral part of how it works - as opposed to giving in to the chaos - shows that life is a bottom-up process. It is not designed from the top down."
This notion, that life is basically a scavenger, using all the bits and bobs it comes across as it tinkers away in real time, is similarly what comes across in the comparison between the mouse and elephant in the video above.
The square cube law can be used to explain why shrinking or expanding animals would be disastrous just in terms of mechanics without about of the biological detail.
The 50s sci-fi film THEM proposes giant ants. These would simply collapse under their own weight due to the thinness of their own legs.
The Gould paper T Clark linked actually talks about exactly this film. I think it's my favourite passage in the paper too, and it gets at what I was trying to say in the OP when I said that giants don't make much engineering sense:
"The creators of horror and science-fiction movies seem to have no inkling of the relationship between size and shape. These “expanders of the possible” cannot break free from the prejudices of their perceptions. The small people of Dr. Cyclops, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and Fantastic Voyage behave just like their counterparts of normal dimensions. They fall off cliffs or down stairs with resounding thuds; they wield weapons and swim with olympic agility. The large insects of films too numerous to name continue to walk up walls or fly even at dinosaurian dimensions.
When the kindly entomologist of Them discovered that the giant queen ants had left for their nuptial flight, he quickly calculated this simple ratio: a normal ant is a fraction of an inch long and can fly hundreds of feet; these ants are many feet long and must be able to fly as much as 1,000 miles. Why, they could be as far away as Los Angeles! (Where, indeed, they were, lurking in the sewers.) But the ability to fly depends upon the surface area of wings, while the weight that must be borne aloft increases as the cube of length. We may be sure that even if the giant ants had somehow circumvented the problems of breathing and growth by molting, their sheer bulk would have grounded them permanently."
Gould's invocation of the 'possible' offers a way into what would be a very interesting discussion about questions of modality - over which the pathetic efforts of analytic philosophers to construct 'modal metaphysics' would show themselves for the shame-inducing embarrassments they are - but I'll lay-by that to another day, I think.
Yes I was always puzzled by the Incredible Shrinking Man. How the hell did he manage to break surface tension of water to have a drink? What was happening inside his body? Was everything shrinking? Surely to keep looking like a man his atoms would have to shrink too? This would make it impossible to sustain his health. But if his cells stayed the same then this would lead to his appearance and internal architecture having to change.
I would imagine it would be possible for a body to acclimatise to reduce the number of mitochondria, but what happens when the size of a capillary would have to be smaller than the cells of which it was comprised? How would memories be preserved as brain cells were inevitably lost?
Matter is actually quite well defined in Aristotelian physics, as the underlying thing which persists through time, when change occurs. It allows that continuity is real. Modern definitions are just branchings from the original which have emerged following Newton's first law of motion, inertia. Newton's first law, leaves that underlying thing which doesn't change, matter, as something mysterious, because it creates the illusion that all aspects of matter can be understood in terms of motion. But the existence matter itself (under the Aristotelian definition) is taken for granted and therefore left unexplained, and mysterious.
Quoting T Clark
The issue is that we scale and practise geometry with immaterial concepts. And we apply the immaterial concepts to material existence. There is something missing in our applications, which is demonstrated by the difficulties of scaling in actual practise. What is missing is a proper understanding of matter.
Stupid Aristotle, ruining films 2000 years after his death.
As I've thought more, this has bothered me about the video that started this thread also. How did they shrink the elephant? Did they shrink the individual cells? Certainly that would bring it's own set of area/volume scaling issues. And in your example, how could you shrink an electron? Or even a molecule for that matter. Take out the extra space? Seems unlikely that could possibly work.
If they are possible, knowing the causes answers the hypothetical, offering no new information.
In matters of science and natural history you have to in some way alter the nature of reality to perform the trick in the first place.
In alternative history scenarios, you have to alter necessity or the conditions of history in the first place, negating any value to your query.
He only discusses "pattern" from 5:00-5:30 and wastes all the other time discussing matter.
I disagree for the potential reasons stated above. These seem to be really vacuous and silly thought experiments, because we're not sure what would happen if we actually enlarge the mouse. The metabolic rate may remain the same, or it may slow down. Both are possibilities.
It's very likely that form acts in a top-down manner on matter.
To you basic science is absurd, we already know that.
Whilst it might be possible for a mouse to reduce the number of its mitochondria, it is likely that this would have to be achieved over a period of weeks and months. There is a good reason why there are no life-forms the size of elephants that are huge fur-balls with hear rates of a minimum of 300 bpm. Elephants beat at 30bpm
You really need to pay more attention.
No, it is YOU who needs to pay more attention and read more science. Just because they have more mitochondria does not mean that those mitochondria will all be active producing energy - to begin with, they will not have sufficient hydrocarbon molecules to produce energy. And it is possible that cells have too many mitochondria for their energy needs, in which case nothing bad happens - there's no overheating. All that happens is that some mitochondria are less active than others, and lysosomes start surrounding those mitochondria and breaking them apart. There might be an issue due to increased oxidation and free radicals.
You have very little understanding of how complex systems function and the kind of negative feedback loops that allow for self-regulation.
To the average person, (that is unless one starts to think about exploding elephants and things like that), the concept of matter has no relevance.
Quoting tim wood
If you think that you can account for the temporal continuity of existence, in a way that is less deficient than the concept of matter, then be my guest. But I suggest that this has already been approached with the concept of energy. And since "matter" and "energy" are both derived from the same fundamental assumptions regarding temporal continuity, they both suffer from the same deficiencies. Simply put, we do not understand the temporal continuity of physical existence.
Quoting tim wood
That's the thing with matter, there is no such thing as what it is, as we must allow that the same matter can be something different at each moment of passing time, to account for the fact that things change as time passes. Matter itself doesn't have a "what it is",so any attempt to say "what matter is", is a mistaken enterprise right off the bat. But we can start to glean an understanding of matter by studying the existence of forms in space and time. For example, in the exploding elephant clip, you can see that when expressed in terms of amount of energy per area of space, it requires a exponentially larger amount of energy to maintain material existence (temporal continuity) of a small object, as it does to maintain the material existence (temporal continuity) of a large object.
Don't forget the thick legs, man, thick legs!
Yes, that's along the lines of what I was referring to by "thick legs", although it seems I didn't read carefully enough; I read Agustino as saying that a creature the shape of a hamster, but the size of an elephant could have evolved. An ordinary-sized elephant-thicklegged hamster. Problem?
You would have to gerrywork your universe a lot to justify the existence of an evolved hamster-sized elephant. Why would an animal so small evolve a trunk? It doesn't need to apply as much force to lift any amount of water, it doesn't need large, unflexible joints to prevent his own legs from breaking, so it's going to be easier for him to lower his head without toppling over.
Perhaps a world with higher gravity?
Err, bodily regulation happens with values within expected ranges for a particular animal's environmental niche - a change from mouse to elephant and vice versa would be orders of magnitude different. No amount of regulation would prevent near-instantaneous death. If no one has yet 'stated the obvious' it because it's so far from obvious as to be flat out silly. Just so we're clear how much of a non-starter it is, here is where a mouse and elephant stand in relation to each other on a heat/size scale:
delicious sauce
Explosions and all round death, no ifs about it.
Exactly. Such a thought experiment proves nothing but a basic misunderstanding of how evolution works on the part of anyone who would propose it. An elephant is as bulky and meaty as it is precisely because of it's size - there's no way it would have 'got there' had its evolutionary path taken the 'small' route. Not to mention it wouldn't have those ridiculous heat expending ears, or, as you rightly point out, that trunk (a proboscis, yes! Because liquid surface tension will murder you at that size and you need to stay far af from any liquid). An elephant would make no evolutionary sense at the scale of a hamster.
A contrario, we can observe that some living structures can be adapted (within reason) to multiple scale orders. Monkeys can be the size of mice or bigger than most humans. Feline will vary between 4 and 650 pounds. Yeah there are elephant species which are smaller than others, but you don't see any of the degree of variation present in, let's say, caniforms, feliforms or even ursidae.
Perhaps there is also something there to exploit?
Ok, to clarify, obviously I was wrong to say that they could have evolved in an environment like Earth's, having to compete for resources with other animals like hamsters. The small elephant would be, relative to the hamster, much slower, so it would have much greater difficulty to get to food compared to the latter.
However - I was not wrong in the sense that there is nothing contradictory physically with an elephant being the size of a hamster. In other words, provided that such a creature had access to food and didn't have to compete for it, it would survive and live.
>:O >:O >:O
In your universe of medieval science maybe. You clearly have no understanding of what determines heart rate. The brain monitors if cells are getting as much oxygen as they need, and if they don't, heart rate increases. It's a negative feedback loop that balances it. The heart won't keep beating faster if all cells are getting sufficient oxygen. When the human body is at rest, the heart beats at 60bpm - when it is running for its life, the heart rate may be at even 200 bpm. How the hell does the body change that eh? Mystery no? >:O
It's because living things aren't mechanisms - that's why this ancient silly scientism is a joke. We're not in the middle ages when we think of things being the stupid dry mechanisms that this guy often portrays them to be in his videos.
So if the hamster gets enlarged to elephant size, its brain would detect that the now bigger heart (which pumps more blood in one go), doesn't need to pump as fast to fulfill the oxygen needs of cells. So it will slow it down significantly. This is almost 100% certain.
It is true that bodily regulation happens within limits - for example a human heart cannot beat at 100,000bpm - but it can beat at 600bpm in atrial fibrillation for example.
However, you are wrong that these limits are governed by expected ranges for a particular animal's environmental niche. More like they are functions of physical limits. If a heart beats too fast, the muscle will break for example. It's a mechanical limit that is under discussion, has zero to do with the environment. In other words, it's something to do with the material's physical resistance.
Quoting StreetlightX
It would depend how fast or slow they are shrunk or grown (over what time period). However, even if they do die, it would not be from overheating or freezing, and that's almost guaranteed. Organisms can self-regulate those aspects of themselves quite easily.
It would not be optimal, but it wouldn't be ridiculous. Keep in mind that the ears aren't the mechanism via which the elephant regulates internal temperature (relative to metabolism rate, the ears are really insignificant). Hippos don't have giant ears. They have tiny ears. So this aspect of the video is another joke - they just imagine the ears have big surface area in order to release more heat. It's easy to think you know when you just imagine nice little solutions to all problems that you have, without bothering to check if your imaginings are also true, and how they fit in the larger context.
Now it is more likely that the elephant's ears have to do with the fact that elephants are often found in very hot climates and are exposed to the sun for a long time. If the elephants were found in more moderate climates, they would most likely not need big ears. In fact, I'm right.
Not ridiculous but you are. The cells of a mouse the size of an elephant would be too big. The number, size and distribution of capillaries too few; for the elephant the size of a mouse the complete opposite would occur. You simply have not thought this out.
No, cells of all these animals are about the same size. Where did you learn biology? In the textbook of Medieval Sciences?!
If you enlarge the mouse you would be enlarging the capillaries too, making it impossible for the healthy exchange of nutrients and gasses.
If you are suggesting that in this hypothetical machine you could proportionately increase the number of cells, you would also have to change the entire architecture of the microscopic level, and macroscopic level to accommodate this change.
But that is not on the table. If it were then you would simply be fudging the hypothetical.
Which goes back to a point I made earlier.
Which ever way to care to take it. How ever much you care to fudge the hypothetical to preserve your vision there is one conclusion that is inevitable.
A mouse the size of an elephant is a big dead mouse.
I don't think anyone was talking of this kind of "enlargement"... Have you watched the video? They weren't talking of this kind of enlargement there. I suggest you pay more attention to the subject of threads in the future.
Quoting Agustino
What kind of enlargement? I posited TWO. Neither of which leads to a living giant mouse.
>:O Yeah, you posited two and dismissed one because "it's not on the table" >:O - give me a break.
As no such machine exists in reality then the field is open for discussion. this is one of the first problems that was chewed over at the top of the thread. You really must pay more attention as you keep making a fool of yourself
The video discusses at length the fact that animal cells of both elephants and mice are around the same size. They do not say that the animals will die when enlarged because of their cells becoming too big. So where have you invented that idea from? When you're proven wrong do you always cower and move goalposts and stomp your feet? :s Or is that only sometimes?
Yes. I don't see the problem with a mini elephant. Or a mouse with thick legs. It would not be very agile but I do not think per se it would be a dangerous impediment to living.
I'm not sure it does. Given the amount of cells in a human body, the size of that information would be absolutely staggering, and would constantly need adjusting. It's more likely that the monitoring function of oxygen levels is emergent from normal individual cellular operations.
The brain "tells" the body to heat up its metabolic at birth because it's flushed full with a cocktail of hormones naturally released during birth, and which kickstart a lot of other organic function such as autonomous breathing and possibly even consciousness.
+ @Augustino
But you're severely underestimating the significance of such a change here, I think. With respect to metabolism, we're talking about two creatures at almost the opposite end of the animal kingdom. The Etruscan shew spoken of in the video has a metabolic rate of about 6 Liters of O2/hour/kg; And African elephant has a rate of 0.164 L of O2/h/kg. That's a 36 fold difference, or a difference of 3600%. More numbers: an elephant on average weighs 250,000x that of a mouse/shrew; but following the scaling laws of surface/area to volume, a shew blown up to the size of an elephant would only have 5000x more surface area by which to expel the same amount of heat: thats a 50 fold difference. There is simply no conceivable way any kind of regulation would overcome the disparity in metabolism and size. It's just fantasy.
And this isnt' even to speak of the phyisological differences. As a furter instance, an elephant's skeleton makes up about 16.5% of an elephants total weight. This is a huge proportion - just under a sixth of it's body mass - one that is necessary precicely in order to support the elephant's giant weight. A mouse's skeleton by contast makes up about 8% of it's body weight, reflective of the fact that it simply doesn't need the kind of supportive structure that an elephant has. And this necessity carries over into other aspects as well: the musculature of an elephant would simply never develop in that way in a creature as small as a mouse or shrew. source (worth a read - covers the same ground as a video, possibly even inspired it. Actually, it's got a great gif of what the surface area of an elephant must look like in order to dispel the heat produced by the shew's metabolism:
Among the closest analogs of what an elephant might look like would be something like a mouse deer, which has a similar leg to upper body proportion to an elephant:
But notice the tiny, tiny girth of it's legs: which enable it to be both nimble, and are all that is necessary to hold up it's similarly tiny tiny weight. The girth of elephant legs on a small creature would be idiotic - without the nibleness they provide, they'd be hunted down and eaten in no time. They're evolutionary nonsense. And with respect to ears, Aug spoke of hippo ears, and seemed to forget that Hippos spend most of the time in water, which does the majority of their cooling for them, so have no need for the massive ears of elephants: in fact another testament to the fact that form is intimately bound up in the immanent conditions which give rise to it (and the engineering of a hippo in general also reflects it's aqueous nature: it's eyes, ears and nostrils are all located as far 'up' on it's body as can be, allowing their senses to be operative while underwater).
All in all: form is only ever the product of immanence.
I agree, the overlap of forms between scales is an exception, and seems to be possible within about only 2 or 3 scales (mostly dog-sized and human-sized). It should not be overstated. Elephants are parts of the Probosciae, but this is misleading, there is nothing common between an elephant's "prosbocis" and a flie's. They belong in different worlds, as per :
It might be possible, although it's difficult to state for sure. Bodies are self-adapting organisms. Take the human heart. It usually beats at 60bpm - it can beat at 200bpm when you're running for your life. And it can beat at 600bpm if you have an illness like atrial fibrillation which interferes with your heart's electric systems' ability to control heart contractions. So, that's a x10 difference. And it can be handled. Now when the human heart is smaller (when you're a baby), your resting pulse can be as high as 150bpm. As the heart grows, its capacity to pump blood improves significantly faster, so pulse generally reduces. Controlling pulse (and blood pressure) is an integral part of your body's self-regulation mechanism, and it usually can control it over a very wide range, which is only limited by the mechanics of the situation.
Quoting StreetlightX
Yes, this is a more likely cause of failure than too high internal temperature, or other self-regulation failures which are unlikely to take place. But again, you don't understand the reason why - you're relying on the somewhat blind intuition that the proportions are not right. This is a mechanical issue. So following Euler's buckling formula and modelling the mouse's leg as a cylindrical column, when we increase both radius and length by a factor of n, then Euler buckling load will increase by a factor of n[sup]2[/sup]. (data from here and here).
So the maximum load it can withstand before it buckles increases at a rate of n[sup]2[/sup] while the mass (and hence load the column has to carry) increases at a rate of n[sup]3[/sup]. So clearly it will fail at some point. If the length + radius increase at x60 (as in the video), then the real load will increase 6000% more than the buckling load.
The main point is once again that failures are unlikely to come from the organisms inability to self-adjust its functioning - they will rather be due to mechanical reasons.
Sure, but there's nothing contradictory in it. It's just a waste of material. Scaling an elephant to the size of a mouse would be more plausible than the other way around.
Quoting StreetlightX
Did dinosaurs have massive ears? :B This ears argument is nonsense. Sure, hippos spend PART of the time in water. But not all of it - they also spend part of the time in the sun.
This is probably wrong - the "only ever" is probably wrong. What you should say is that immanence restricts the possibilities of form, not that it outright determines them. There are some forms that, given immanent conditions (such as Earth's gravity, temperature, etc.) are impossible.
So if the mouse gets a bigger heart, then of course pulse rate will change. Likewise, if the mouse grows much bigger through the resizing, with more cells, etc. of course the metabolism rate will be adjusted, some of the mitochondria will stop working or slow down, etc.
If by 'a part' you mean about 16 hours a day, sure. Long enough, in other words, that water would function as the environmental niche driving hippo morphology. And while the dinosaur question is still open, the evidence is that they were mesotherms (if not simply exotherms out-and-out), which means they employed a mix of hot and cold-bloodedness to regulate their temperature, which is (one of) the reasons they could get so big. They can't then be meaningfully compared to either the hot-blooded (endothermic) hippo or elephant.
Quoting Agustino
Sure, but the very limits of the mechanics would be themselves evolutionarily derived: that a heart wall is this thick and not that thick, that bone density would be such and not so, is not just an accident of mechanics but a function of evolutionary honing. The case is the same with respect to metabolic regulation; again, consider the numbers: the scaling difference in weight is 250,000x up or down, while the corresponding difference in surface area is a 'mere' 5000x up or down: any metabolic regulation would have to keep up with this 50 fold increase/decrease, which is just insane. It's literally nonsense.
As the gif above shows, an elephant would have to deform in an unimaginable - nonsensical - way for any such metabolic regulation to keep pace. You keep discounting the disproportion in rate of growth between surface area and volume. And let's further keep in mind that we're not just talking about a temporary limit-situation as with an atrial fibrillation event, but a permanent change. Even if it is granted that metabolic regulation might be able to kick into gear during a such a stress-event, no regulation would be able to keep up in the face of such permanence stress (and let's be clear: it's an understatement to even call 'stress' itself an understatement in the scenario we're talking about).
You keep leaning on 'regulation' as though it were some magical instrument that can simply alter metabolic and other rates willy nilly: but this simply flies in the face of any understanding of evolution and doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. Regulation is not magic, it is limited by 'expected' evolutionary ranges (which in turn, determine biomechanical limits), and would fail catastrophically in what could only really be described as a catastrophic biological event. Considering that a two degree difference is enough to set hypothermia at work in a human (and .5 of a degree change for hyperthemia), again, I simply can't take your recourse to regulation seriously. It's be like arguing that an oar could steer an oil tanker. It's magical thinking.
That's not exactly true. If you look at the process of evolution theoretically, then... well let me draw a diagram.
Above is an evolutionary space with only one variable (in reality there will be a multitude of variables, so the graph will be multi-dimensional). If the organism starts at the red point, then through mutation and other evolutionary mechanisms, it (well, really, its children) will travel towards the first peak. Once it reaches the first peak, it can only get to the next, higher peak if through a single mutation it can breach that gap marked on the graph. If it can't, then future mutations will get undone over time, making it remain at the first peak. So depending on the size of that gap, the evolutionary process may not actually yield optimal results.
So evolution is only good at locating LOCAL peaks in fitness, not necessarily global ones. Depending on the topology of the evolutionary space, this may not be the best strategy.
The limits of mechanics are constraining factors in the process of evolution, they are not themselves evolutionarily derived. That a heart's wall is this thick is the result of evolution BUT that a heart's muscle can only bear this much in shear stress before it breaks, etc. - that's not a product of evolution, that is a physical limitation which constrains what is evolutionarily possible.
This is a good book on similar topics that I first read when I was a student (it deals with biological structures and how materials set limits to it, amongst also dealing with man-made structures).
Quoting StreetlightX
Don't forget that the mechanics of the situation do change when the animal changes size. They have bigger hearts, more cells, etc.
Quoting StreetlightX
Sure, there are some mechanical limits to what regulation can do, as I said. I haven't found a mechanical limit with regards to temperature, just your assertion that the difference seems to be too big.
Quoting Agustino
Well given that the internal temperature tolerance range of mammals lies within the range of a single degree or so, and given that the kind of 'regulation' you're talking about would need to alter metabolic rates by 3600%, in comparison to the usual 2-11% intra-daily resting metabolic variation, again, you're basically arguing for magic.