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A long-standing problem has been the origin of quarter-power allometric scaling laws that relate many characteristics of organisms to their body mass - specifically, whole-organism metabolic rate, B = aMb, where M is body mass, a is a taxon-dependent normalization, and b ~ 3/4 for animals and plants. Darveau et al. propose a multiple-cause model for mammalian metabolic rate as the sum of multiple contributors", Bi, which they assume to scale as Bi = aiMbi, and obtain b ~ 0.78 for the basal and 0.86 for the maximally active rate, \V̇maxO2. We argue, however, that this scaling equation is based on technical, theoretical and conceptual errors, including misrepresentations of our published results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]