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It went like this: I wanted (for the Handbook) the data on seawater composition, then I got involved in a comparison of the elements abundance in the Earth’s crust and sea, then a question crossed my mind if there is a relationship to the elements abundance in the human body -

 

and then I was disappointed once more on current level of Internet data presentation and interpretation. Primarily, it is poor design of tables and graphs but it goes deeper than that because of linear thinking in both, data presentation and interpretation.

elements of the human body

It seems that ‘Elements in the human body’ is a rather popular high school project and freshman general chemistry assignment (about 4,380,000 Google hits). And most ‘researchers’ are impressed with the fact that oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen make some 96 wt%, then comes calcium at ‘low’ 1.5 wt%, phosphorus ‘only’ 0.7 wt%, then ‘trace amounts’ of dozen other elements. Many quote Herman J. Muller (Nobel Price in Physiology or Medicine, 1946):

"To say that a man is made up of certain chemical elements is a satisfactory description only for those who intend to use him as a fertilizer."

I don’t know in which context this was said. However, I believe it was Muller’s reaction to that ‘weight percentage’ type of data presentation. You can’t be aware that chromium participates in glucose metabolism by enhancing the effects of insulin and at the same time present chromium at a linear weight percentage graph - its abundance is about one millionth part of a 1 wt%.

When a range of values encompassing three or more orders of magnitude are to be presented, it should be done on a logarithmic scale. Besides, natural processes and relationships are of exponential character. 

  The above graph does not include a functional importance of a particular element, it is missing a dimension of that type, but at least it removes visual negligence of ‘trace amounts’ of a linear weight percentage graph.
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Krešimir J. Adamić