concept

Allometry

The study of how an organism's shape, proportions, and physiological processes change with body size. The core rule: biological quantities rarely scale one-to-one with size - they follow a power law, Y = a·Mᵇ, where the exponent b decides how fast the quantity grows with mass. This is why an animal cannot simply be scaled up: bone thickness, heart rate, and wing area must all re-proportion for the body to keep working. It is the tool for testing whether Pandora's giants like the pa'li and ikran are physically plausible.