How Animals Work

"That’s about right. It’s statistical because it’s full of graphs. Schmidt-Nielsen’s books have graphs of metabolic rates versus running speed and flying speed for different animals, exhaled air temperature of lizards, all sorts of things. Yes, a graph of data is always a statistic. Most of this is not statistics, though, it’s really physics . How can birds fly and lift themselves up in the air? How do dogs cool themselves by panting? It sounds sort of obvious: They’re dripping water and as water evaporates it cools the tongue. But, as he points out, if you’re a dog and you’re panting to cool your tongue, you have to get the cool blood that’s in your tongue circulating to the rest of your body, you actually have to circulate all your blood through your tongue to cool it off. So how do you get it there? You have to move the blood fast. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The book has a lot of things like that. He’s looking at things that people take for granted, and saying, you can’t just take these things for granted, these are amazing feats of engineering. Another reason I connect it with statistics – it’s not only the graphs ­– is the fact there’s an interplay between physics modelling, real substantive modelling using the laws of physics, and data collection and statistical analysis. It goes back and forth. People gathered data that inspired him to come up with a physical description, and then he gathered more data – or other people gathered data – and sometimes it turns out the description works and sometimes it turns out it doesn’t. And that’s what statistics is all about – it’s about building real models, using real information."