Comment on "Revising the distributive networks models of West, Brown and Enquist (1997) and Banavar, Maritan and Rinaldo (1999): Metabolic inequity of living tissues provides clues for the observed allometric scaling rules" by Makarieva, Gorshkov and Li

We show that the criticism of Makarieva et al. of our work on metabolic scaling in living organisms was noted and fully addressed in our work 3 years ago. The two foundations of our theory are the scaling properties of optimal transportation networks and the balance between supply and demand. Makarieva et al. have not recognized how the latter was used to elucidate the specific but very simple conditions under which quarter-power scaling of organismic metabolism would be expected. When the scaling of demand balances the scaling of supply, the commonly observed allometric scaling laws follow directly from the geometric properties of the transportation network.