Because larger animals metabolize at higher rates following the ¾ power scaling law, they suffer greater production of entropy and therefore greater overall damage, so you might have thought that this would imply that larger animals would have shorter life spans in obvious contradiction to observation. However, we saw in chapter 3 that on a cellular or per unit mass of tissue basis metabolic rate and therefore the rate at which damage is occurring at the cellular and intracellular levels decreases systematically with increasing size of the animal—another expression of economy of scale.
