Adrian Bejan, a noted heat transfer researcher, believes that he has found laws that would explain locomotion on the ground, in the air and in water. This is pretty significant since it does not seem obvious on how to connect swimming behavior to walking on the ground. Most of his argument revolves around what he calls constructal theory which as far as I understand says that nature allows for different shapes to occur as a result of optimizing heat transfer at different scales. That results allows for a clear explanation of tree like structures for the lungs, veins, trees, roots which has mostly being looked at as being an ad-hoc assumption. This is a also a result that explains why Nature is not made of fractals. In 2000, he showed you could draw a line through meat flies on 747s on the same graph (the x-axis is the mass, the y-axis is their theoretical speed). This time he shows how, given gravity, density of the body, air and water he can fit pretty much all living things in log-log straight lines.
This is very interesting on many levels. Obviously, our brain says it OK when we see shapes that follow these principles:
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