Good luck! 🤞

I think “mechanistic” is being used in different senses here

On brain size? I thought the point being addressed here is what is the allometric relationship between brain and body size?

We did account for model complexity in our model testing. A quadratic model fit the data significantly better )not just better). The size dependency in the parameters from linear models is a very striking feature . This is all explained in the paper and SI

Plotting regressions without regard to phylogeny - as in the older literature - is the more general issue.

To me, the concept of a ‘system’ implies selection. That’s how the appearance of design happens and why we can talk about function. But in practice it’s very complicated with lots of genes and lots of aspects of the phenotype - so agree with your point, ‘targets’ are hard to specify

Suspect Steve’s point is that our paper (he cites above) reveals nonlinear scaling even in log-log space, and doesn’t support the conclusions of the paoer Mauricio cited, nor specifically a power law of 0.75

Precisely

Or selection on neural systems has consequences for brain size - brain size as an outcome rather than a target of selection

They are all loosely connected but in multifarious, complicated nonlinear ways not captured by simple correlations