Returning to my number of muscle cells an adult human body example (from the initial stable equilibrium post), for the purposes of calculating lean vs. fat mass (or just weight), we don’t care about the fact that the distribution shifts as the person ages and experiences sarcopenia.
For predator-prey population size ratios, the ratio fluctuates slightly on a daily basis assuming the predators hunt at certain times of the day and potentially seasonally. Assuming both species live more than a year, neither matters for estimating the carrying capacity of the ecosystem for the predator species.
For calculating the average body temperature of a species, we can mostly ignore real but small fluctuations that occur throughout the day due to circadian rhythms, digestion, etc.
One theme in these: they’re all conclusions which seem pretty intuitive. One of the nice things about timescale separation is that it gives us a formal justification for a lot of intuitively-sensible conclusions.
Returning to my number of muscle cells an adult human body example (from the initial stable equilibrium post), for the purposes of calculating lean vs. fat mass (or just weight), we don’t care about the fact that the distribution shifts as the person ages and experiences sarcopenia.
For predator-prey population size ratios, the ratio fluctuates slightly on a daily basis assuming the predators hunt at certain times of the day and potentially seasonally. Assuming both species live more than a year, neither matters for estimating the carrying capacity of the ecosystem for the predator species.
For calculating the average body temperature of a species, we can mostly ignore real but small fluctuations that occur throughout the day due to circadian rhythms, digestion, etc.
One theme in these: they’re all conclusions which seem pretty intuitive. One of the nice things about timescale separation is that it gives us a formal justification for a lot of intuitively-sensible conclusions.