Abstract
Humans have but 100,000 genes made up from about 109 pairs of bases (purines or pyrimidines) in DNA. There are about 250 different cell types in the body and each has a multitude of enzymes and structural proteins. The numbers of cells in the body is beyond counting. The numbers of structural elements in a small organ exceeds the numbers of genes; the heart has about 10 million capillary tissue units, each composed of endothelial cells, myocytes, fibroblasts, and neurons. The lung has even more. Consequently, the genes, the instruction set, must command the growth of cells and structures most parsimoniously, and end up with functioning structures that last for decades.
Organic form itself is found, mathematically speaking, to be a function of time... We might call the form of an organism an event in space-time, not merely a configuration in space.
D’Arcy Thompson (1942)
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© 1994 American Physiological Society
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Bassingthwaighte, J.B., Liebovitch, L.S., West, B.J. (1994). Fractal Growth. In: Fractal Physiology. Methods in Physiology Series. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7572-9_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7572-9_11
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-7572-9
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