Compare a mouse and an elephant, and you'll see it right away: the mouse is jittery and hot, the elephant calm and cool. The mouse burns energy far faster for its size. For a long time, scientists couldn't figure out why. It turns out the answer lies in how oxygen delivery works inside the body.
Each block works like a little factory: blood brings oxygen in, cells take it up. Scientists calculated the ideal size for such a block, one that would let oxygen be used completely while the vessels take up as little space as possible. It turned out that in warm-blooded animals, from a mouse to a whale, the number of blocks is the same: about five hundred million. The difference in body size comes not from adding new blocks but from making each one bigger.
The bigger the block, the more slowly oxygen reaches the cells, which is why an elephant's metabolism runs slower than a mouse's. This also explains heart rate: a shrew's heart beats a thousand times a minute, while a whale's beats just ten to twenty. The theory makes it possible to estimate how much energy extinct animals needed, dinosaurs for instance, based on their body mass.
A shrew's heart beats at about 1000 beats per minute, while a whale's beats only 10-20 times. The theory explains this difference through the number of holons and the volume of blood the heart must pump per beat.
Not published on arXiv. Here are its page, the PDF and the formalization: you can check it yourself, not only read our account.