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Why Bigger Animals Live Longer: The Relationship between Size, Energy, and Longevity
Summary:
The larger an animal is, the more efficient it becomes in terms of energy consumption.
This is because the self-similar fractal structure of larger animals allows them to save energy. Bigger animals require less energy proportionally to run their bodies due to the massive amount of tissue per gram or per cell.
As a result, bigger animals experience less wear and tear and live longer than smaller animals.
The reason for less wear and tear is that bigger animals use less energy and create less damage, reducing entropy.
This principle can also be observed in machines, where those subjected to less stress and driven at lower revs per minute tend to last longer.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
So that's why we don't need to double our metabolism when we double our weight. It's that fractal like self similarity that allows us to get these essentially efficient savings in the amount of energy we need. So it's better to be bigger, isn't it? Because you don't need as much energy proportionally to run yourself. Correct.
Speaker 1
So you need massive tissue per gram of tissue or per cell. You need less energy, the bigger you are. And by the way, this has huge consequences throughout all aspects of biology and life. And maybe one just to tie it back to the beginning of this discussion where we started out by talking about aging and mortality. This means that the bigger you are, the less hard your cell is working. The bigger you are, there's less wear and tear the longer you live systematically. So this is the origin of why bigger things live longer than smaller things.
Speaker 2
And why is there less wear and tear if you're bigger?
Speaker 1
You're using less energy and creating less entropy. That is you're creating less damage the bigger you are because simply you're using much less energy if you have an engine, an automobile and you insist on racing it at 10,000 revs per Minute every time you drive it, I can assure you that car will not live as long as a car that's driven by a little old lady or a little old man like me who keeps the revs at about two or three Thousand revs per minute. So you know, cars and machines last much longer, the less stress you put on them.
Scaling 2 — You and I Are Fractals
Simplifying Complexity
Psychologist Richard Wiseman created a study using waiters to identify what was the more effective method of creating a connection with strangers: mirroring or positive reinforcement. One group of waiters, using positive reinforcement, lavished praise and encouragement on patrons using words such as “great,” “no problem,” and “sure” in response to each order. The other group of waiters mirrored their customers simply by repeating their orders back to them. The results were stunning: the average tip of the waiters who mirrored was 70 percent more than of those who used positive reinforcement.
Never Split the Difference
Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
The Small Animal Replacement Problem in Animal Advocacy
Summary:
Choosing a meat tax as a form of advocacy may seem logical, but it can actually lead to a shift in consumption from red meat to white meat like chicken and fish.
This shift increases the number of animals farmed overall, which is known as the small animal replacement problem.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
The vast difference in choosing one campaign over another and how much difference you can have between the two. But actually, not only that, just highlighting the damage you can do. That was so enlightening for me. I think I've never thought about it like that before. I think specifically we were working with an organisation on whether doing a meat tax would be an effective form of advocacy. On the surface, you're like, oh, meat tax, yeah, it makes sense. It's the same as cigarette, alcohol or other kind of syntaxes that we have in the UK. It's just put a tax on me and then less consumption, less demand, etc. Then just kind of flippantly thinking about it in that sense and then the team did an in-depth report and actually kind of long story short. I would recommend going and reading the report if you're interested. But essentially consumption moves generally from the red meat from an environmental or health perspective and that's what in the UK, that's the only way that could be passed is through An environmental or health committee. Yeah, like a carbon tax on food products, that kind of thing. Right, exactly. And actually all that does is move consumption from red meat cows to white meat, like chicken and fish. And so actually for looking at numbers, comparatively farming one cow versus 50 chickens that it would take to be comparable, the numbers are huge and even more so for fish and probably Shrimp as we were talking about before. So actually just that shifting consumption was going to increase the amount of animals that were farmed. And so all of a sudden within a short space of time, we've gone from, or I certainly did, I feel like the team have more experienced some more skeptical and it's called the small animal Replacement problem. And we've been talking about this for a long time.
Introducing — How I Learned to Love Shrimp
How I Learned to Love Shrimp
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