In science, Max Kleiber (1893-1976) was a Swiss-born American agricultural chemist and animal metabolism researcher noted for his 1961 The Fire of Life: an Introduction to Animal Energetics, wherein he cites the work of Gilbert Lewis (1923) the 1957 energetics of biochemical reactions work of Irving Klotz, among others. [1]Kleiber, in short, showed that an animal’s "metabolic rate", or specifically basil metabolic rate (BMR), in contrast to resting metabolic rate (RMR), scales to the three-quarter’s power of the animal’s mass: [4]
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| The cover of Kleiber's 1961 book The Fire of Life, nearly boarders on some type of "living fire" or living flame conceptualized presentation. |
“Biology was reconstructed on thermodynamic grounds in the 1920s through the work of A.G. Tansley, Edgar Transeau, Max Kleiber, and others who began conceiving of organisms as energy fixers or consumers and of natural systems as complex webs of energy flows and transformations, thereby developing the modern science of ecology. Alfred Lotka and Howard Odum extended the approach, pointing to the role that energy appropriation plays in evolution: individuals and species that have the largest net energy surplus can dedicated more of their life energy to reproduction, outcompeting their rivals.”— Eric Zencey (2013), “Energy as Master Resource” [2]
