Why Trees Defy Errera's Law

Science is very careful in naming laws as tributes for their discoverers, and those
recognitions are expected to be permanent ones since the physical sciences and
mathematics believe their laws will be absolute and unyielding. Conjectures and
hypotheses need not apply.

The laws of biological science have softer textures, however, since the creatures they
cover are the embodiment of self-selected dynamics and change. A hundred million
year's previous use of some operational method for a life form may further advance
or simply disappear tomorrow, and new workable accommodations of chemistry and
physics will be the core of the next evolution. Life too, has its laws, but they have the
inescapable caveat that nature may change them anytime she desires.

Errera's law (1888) holds that the divisional plane of a cell will take place along the
smallest surface area. This is explained as an economy of time, material and energy
that all cells follow. It is not Errera's conjecture or Errera's theorem; we find it in the
literature as a law.

In Growth Patterns in Vascular Plants and The Vascular Cambium, on the cambium of
trees, both Iqbal and Larson as respective authors, state that cambial cells "violate"
or" do not conform to Errera's law." Neither text, however, asks the question, "Why?"

To answer that question, the author steps from an illustration in a children¹s science
book, through cambial anatomy and cytobiology, including an examination of
Aeschynomene hispida as an example of periclinal and anticlinal divisions that occur
exclusively along the maximum plane or surface area.

The explanation is both fascinating and provocative: Cambial cells ignore Errera's law
to operate under other laws that better serve the broader biological designs of the
cambium rather than a singular issue of cellular efficiency.

Bob Wulkowicz, March, 1998 ©