Ontogenetic growth: Schmalhausen or von Bertalanffy?: comment on "Physiologic time: A hypothesis" by D. West and B.J. West.

The paper [1] is very interesting and important for the biology of development. This is primarily due to the range of the topics involved: physiological and physical (chronological) times, allometry, metabolism, and growth rate. However, there have already been investigations that attempted to connect the above concepts. These papers are partially presented in the large bibliography [1] or, for instance, in [2]. What is so specific about this paper? In my opinion, it is the involvement of the Shannon information entropy and the hypothesis that the fluctuations in the total body mass are described by a scaling probability density. This allows obtaining a very interesting result, which was not noted by D. West and B.J. West in the paper. Indeed, from the comparison of Eq. (34) and Eq. (37) (or Eq. (35) and Eq. (36)) it follows that the average total body mass (m) is a homogeneous function of the chronological time (t ), i.e.: