Athel wrote:
"Years ago J. B. S. Haldane (or maybe his father, the physiologist J. S.
Haldane) wrote an article called "On being the right size" that dealt
with many of these questions, but I don't remember if it discussed
metabolic rate as such."
It was J B S Haldane. The essay was one of many popular articles he wrote.
A collection called "On being the right size and other essays" was
published by Oxford University Press in the 1980s. It does mention
metabolic rate in connection with the surface area/ heat loss argument, but
also describes some of the other scaling issues that Martin Brand alluded to.
David Fell
