From the same “Seeking Wisdom” book I alluded to in the previous post, I had figured out another important idea which I had not considered and it is due to very elementary physics principles which I forgot to consider when I originally tried to calculate what is the maximum possible height potential in humans in previous posts like “What Is The Highest Theoretical Height Of The Human Species?” and “What The Experts Really Mean When They State “Genetics Determine Height”, And Are They Right?”
The principle was over the idea of just the fact that the surface to volume area would become too much to handle the loads on it. Remember that the human body does have 3 dimensions. If we are going to increase in one direction, vertically, for the human body to follow suit and be proportional, it has to increase in the other 2 directions as well, in width, and length. This means also that the surface area will also increase. However, as stated in the 2nd post alluded to above, where I had talked about the issue of insects with exoskeletons collapsing on themselves, While the volume increases from the height increase, the surface area will increase at a slower rate since Volume is proportional to D^3 and the surface area is proportional to D^2.
If this continues, there will come a point where the surface area/volume ratio will become so small, that the thickness and strength of the animal will be compromised. We must remember that the skin always has some force exerted on it, from the inside and outside. That force over a surface is a pressure. If the surface area/ volume is too small, the pressure which is inversely dependent on the surface area can be so high that the skin can be too weak to hold the animal intact. This was the basic idea of insect collapse from their exoskeleton.
For the organism to stay alive, the main idea nature can try is to make the skin thicker, thus tougher. This would work, but the thick skin will eventually act as a cover which keeps on the heat of the mammal inside. There will be a point where the animal reaches to such a volume that the inner heat that is generated in the mammal (hot blooded) will not be able to be released enough to keep the homeostatic condition, and the heat accumulates until the animal melts from the inside.
The way that the dinosaurs can escape this contraint over thick skin causing excessive heat internally is because they were cold blooded living in a relatively hot and humid planet in their time. The heat went in a out to in direction which was what allowed them to stay alive, keep homeostasis, and not melt from the inside. If the dinosaurs were brought to a place that was cold, they would just fall down from the collapse of their system and freeze to death. In today’s animal kingdom, the biggest animals are mammals, the blue whale, but they are in the water, which at this point I would guess act as a heat sink, and they probably have a circulatory system which makes their body very efficient in removing the high amount of heat generated.
I guess I could argue that there are some animals like the elephant which is relatively large and is a mammal but they are on 4 legs. The obvious counter argument is then that the larger mammals we find in earth’s past like Wooly Mammoth was from the Ice Age and the present biggest mammal carnivore in the world the Polar bear both come from the cold arctic region. The cold climate is similar to the cold water for the Blue Whale. It acts as a medium/sink for the heat to be released or go towards. This idea would agree then with Bergmann’s Rule.
This post shows that besides the fact of gravitational force, and the loading dimensions of the organism’s anatomy and basic structure, we also have to consider the fact that the surface area/volume ratio is almost going to limit the size of a bipedal, warm blooded creature due to heat transfer and boundary permeability characteristics. The human being will never become over 100 feet tall, 50 feet tall, or even 30 feet tall. The physics will not allow their bodies to hold together. At this point, I can not calculate the actual maximum height possible, although I have tried before.
