Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Exhibit Hall CD, Midwest Airlines Center
Background/Question/Methods There have been recent breakthroughs in discovering mathematical scaling laws in biology and ecology by a small team of scientists (West, Brown, Enquist, et alia). Though there has been extensive data crunching and mathematical exploration of the transcendence of these scaling patterns across multitudes of biological systems, there has been little philosophical, scientific, and artistic investigation of the qualitative meanings of these laws, and their implications for restructuring/re-organizing the entire way how we understand biological reality. Results/Conclusions Primarily, these mathematical principles provide the license to apply spacetime reasoning and a constructionist approach—the mental organizing tools of geology and film—into the overarching discipline of biology. This poster will touch on the main themes and applications of scaling laws to qualitative re-structuring of ecological systems on planet Earth at multiple scales: from deep to present times, from non-human to human systems, and even to providing implications in the realm of constructing and managing human-environmental systems for short- and long-term sustainability. The products of this poster will be submitted to the international STAGE script competition at UC Santa Barbara, a contest involving artistic, creative story-telling for science and technology, such as to communicate academic ideas to wider audiences.
