The Number of Cells in Your Body Align with A Mysterious Pattern in Nature
This pattern is found throughout nature, and curiously, language
Hiya!
Know what’s cool? Nature. I mean, if you think about it, everything traces back to nature. Some might even argue that nature is everything. Nature is life and everything that comes with it, in every shape and form it takes. But Nature is also everything else, from the weather to the workings of Outer Space. Nature even has its own language, which we call math. Nature can be easily experienced but has layers of complexity. For all its variations in form, all things in Nature share one thing — cycles.
Patterns and cycles are found literally everywhere in Nature. They come in all shapes, sizes, and time frames. Some are obvious, like seasonal changes or day and night. Those two examples alone then influence a whole swath of other cycles, from plant life to animal behavior, including our sleep cycles. Then there are the nearly invisible cycles that are far less obvious and explainable — such as why there are spirals everywhere in Nature. Now, researchers have linked the cells that make up our bodies to another pattern in Nature — one that experts have noticed but can’t explain, or even fully name.
Mysterious Inverse Size-Number Pattern
Most patterns experts have identified in nature have names, but this one is so widespread that it’s challenging to use only one name. It’s a mathematical pattern based on the relationship between size and numbers.
Ian Hatton, an ecologist at McGill University in Montreal and the lead author of a study I’ll tell you about soon, told Science News, “We see this pattern all over the place” across diverse research fields. In ecology, the pattern is called the Sheldon spectrum, named after marine ecologist Raymond Sheldon.
In 1972, Sheldon and his colleagues published research after discovering that if you sort plankton by size and graph each group so the values on each axis get exponentially larger (on a logarithmic scale), then the total weight of each size group will equal the same mass. As an organism increases in size, it decreases in total numbers, but the combined mass remains the same.
In other words, small organisms outnumber larger organisms in the ocean, but each size group generally has the same total mass as all other groups. And for some reason, this size distribution has been found across scientific fields.
Sheldon was the first to notice this pattern regarding plankton, but more recent research found it also applies to a range of marine species, from bacteria to whales.
Yet, the pattern is more expansive than explaining size distribution in the oceans. The same basic concept is found in Zipf’s law, named after linguist George Zipf, who proposed it in 1949, but it is sometimes referred to as the path of least resistance and Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort.
Zipf’s law theorizes that “the ‘one single primary principle’ in any human action, is the expenditure of the least amount of effort to accomplish a task.” In the decades since Zipf’s theory was published, researchers have linked Zipf’s law to asteroids, city size, and linguistics. For example, Zipf’s law shows that shorter words like “the” appear often in an average book, whereas longer words appear less frequently.
The fact that this pattern is found in such a wide range of places inspired Hatton to suspect there may be “some deep underlying mechanism that could be common to all these different things.” However, experts aren’t yet sure what the mechanism is.
Still, Hatton and his colleagues’ new research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found yet another system this mysterious pattern applies — to the cells making up our bodies. Their study also provided estimates for how many cells make up the human body — something science has worked to refine for over a decade.
New Research
Independent researcher Jeffery Shander, who was part of the new study, first started assembling data to figure out how many cells the human body contained more than a decade ago.
Most of his data came from the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), which uses information gathered from performing countless cadaver autopsies and weighing organs to create a reference model for a person.
But more recently, Shander joined Hatton and an international team of experts from Germany, the United States, and Canada for the new study. Together, the team used data collected from over 1,500 published sources on the major cell types in the human body. The study’s co-author, Eric Galbraith, an ecologist at McGill University in Canada, told New Scientist:
“The key was looking for papers that described the number of cells in different tissues. And then knowing that those kinds of tissue were made up of particular cells and knowing what the size range of those cells were.”
Ultimately, the team determined that a man weighing about 155 pounds (70 kg) contains about 36 trillion cells. A 130-pound (59 kg) woman has roughly 28 trillion cells, and a 70-pound (32 kg) child (about the size of a 10-year-old) has around 17 trillion cells.
However, there is one caveat — most of the data the team used came from previous research primarily focused on men, so the total cell counts for women and children are less certain.
Still, it’s exciting we have a more accurate cell count for the human body, but what’s more exciting is how our cell count is distributed among cell types.
The Pattern Appeared
Even though all cells are itty-bitty, they vary widely in size — including the cells that make up our bodies. For instance, our platelets and red blood cells are on the smaller end of the scale, while muscle cells are on the larger side.
Using the collected data, the researchers created 1,200 cell groupings that can be broken down into 400 cell types across 60 different tissues. Then, they evaluated the size range, cell mass, and cell count for each group.
They discovered that smaller cells, like our red blood cells, are more common in our bodies, while larger cells, like our muscle cells, are less abundant. Yet, the amount of matter making up the cells within each size category is remarkably constant.
In other words, if you took all the cells in your body and grouped them into similar sizes, you’d likely find far more smaller cells than larger ones, but each grouping would contribute about the same total amount of mass to your body.
The team found another surprise, too.
Based on their analysis, the researchers suggest that humans have roughly four times more lymphocytes in our bodies than previously estimated — instead of 500 billion, the team suggests there could be as many as 2 trillion.
If you don’t know, lymphocytes are a type of white blood cell that help our immune system fight off infections and disease. A better understanding of how many lymphocytes are in a person’s body is essential for helping people with conditions like HIV and leukemia.
Since cancer occurs when rapid cell division throws cell counts off balance, learning more about cell frequencies in the body could be critical to better understanding and treating such diseases, along with allowing us to better understand human health in general.
Perspective Shift
So now we know that ecology, city size, language, asteroids, and the very cells that make up our bodies all seem to follow this mysterious pattern.
If patterns and cycles are a constant in Nature, balance is the key that keeps them going. This is easy to see with global warming — throwing Earth’s atmospheric cycles outta whack causes chaotic weather events, which go on to affect countless other cycles that rely on stable weather patterns.
The new research shows that our body, including this mysterious inverse size-number pattern, relies on balance. There must be more smaller cells than larger ones. If something disturbs this, then diseases can form.
All of this also reminds me of Benford’s law, another bizarre pattern in nature, which is when you take a collection of numbers — whether utility bills, home prices, or even the Fibonacci sequence — and group them into piles according to the first digit of each number, a pattern emerges.
Your “one pile” will contain about a third of the total numbers, while the two pile is about 17 percent, and a downward trend continues to the number nine, which only surfaces as the first number in a digit less than 5 percent of the time! So, in a way, Bendford’s law is another example where there are more smaller numbers than larger numbers in any given collection.
See what I mean? Nature is so cool.
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Alex put it perfectly!
Wow, fascinating!! Gives the "balance of nature" concept a whole new level of meaningfulness, and I'm now pondering our planet's past "mass extinctions" in a whole new LITERAL light. It seems that if we really keep messing up earth's balance, Mother Gaia will indeed soon exterminate the cancerous mass we've become. Thanks so much for sharing this, and Happiest of Holidays to you and yours!