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Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

Geoffrey B. West

4.14 · Rating details · 3,169 ratings · 423 reviews

The former head of the Sante Fe Institute, visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term “complexity” can be misleading, however, because what makes West’s discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena The former head of the Sante Fe Institute, visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term “complexity” can be misleading, however, because what makes West’s discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses.

Fascinated by issues of aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science, creating a new understanding of energy use and metabolism: West found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal’s circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient—and lives 25% longer. This speaks to everything from how long we can expect to live to how many hours of sleep we need. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism's body.

West's work has been game-changing for biologists, but then he made the even bolder move of exploring his work's applicability to cities. Cities, too, are constellations of networks and laws of scalability relate with eerie precision to them. For every doubling in a city's size, the city needs 15% less road, electrical wire, and gas stations to support the same population. More amazingly, for every doubling in size, cities produce 15% more patents and more wealth, as well as 15% more crime and disease. This broad pattern lays the groundwork for a new science of cities.

Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work on cities and biological life to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The implications of these discoveries are far-reaching, and are just beginning to be explored.
Scale is a thrilling scientific adventure story about the elemental natural laws that bind us together in simple but profound ways. Through the brilliant mind of Geoffrey West, we can envision how cities, companies and biological life alike are dancing to the same simple, powerful tune, however diverse and unrelated they are to each other.

From the Hardcover edition. ...more

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Dec 01, 2017 David rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biology, economics, physics, mathematics

This is a fantastic book about scaling laws and how to understand them. Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist, who has spent a lot of time at the Santa Fe Institute, deriving theoretical scaling laws, and applying them successfully to biology, cities, and companies. He derives the theories from the structure of networks; arteries, capillaries in organisms, social networks and city infrastructure, and companies.

The scaling laws themselves are fascinating. In the very first chapter, Geoffrey We This is a fantastic book about scaling laws and how to understand them. Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist, who has spent a lot of time at the Santa Fe Institute, deriving theoretical scaling laws, and applying them successfully to biology, cities, and companies. He derives the theories from the structure of networks; arteries, capillaries in organisms, social networks and city infrastructure, and companies.

The scaling laws themselves are fascinating. In the very first chapter, Geoffrey West hits the reader with an astounding set of scaling laws that certainly surprised me. As to biology, there are about 50 different metrics that have interesting scaling laws--and West touches on a few of them. The scaling of metabolism, heart rates, brain matter, growth rates, life spans, aorta lengths, tree heights, and on and on; you get the picture. These scaling laws pertain across organisms, from the tiniest microbe to the blue whale; over 20 orders of magnitude.

But the really surprising aspect is that almost all of the scaling laws are factors of 1/4! For example, metabolic rate scales as Mass to the 3/4 power. Doubling the mass of a mammal increases its time to maturity by 1/4, its lifetime increases by 1/4, and its heart rate decreases by 1/4. And, these laws apply over the entire range of mammals, despite their diversity. Mitochondrial mass, relative to the total mass of an organism, goes as Mass to the -1/4 power. And, Geoffrey West describes how he and colleagues have derived theoretical scaling laws and growth curves from first principles. He shows how remarkably well the data fit his theoretical predictions.

As a physicist, West felt that this universal 1/4-power scaling tells us something fundamental about the dynamics, structure, and organization of life. These laws suggest dynamical processes that constrain evolution. And there are some surprising constants among all mammals. Blood pressure is approximately the same, and the number of heart beats in a lifetime is about the same, among all mammals!

But the discussion of scaling laws don't stop with biology. West finds fascinating scaling laws that apply to cities and to companies. The most perplexing question he addresses is, why do most cities live forever, while companies have short lifetimes? Cities are the prime drivers of economic development, not the nation state. And, most of the scaling laws associated with cities are either to the 0.85 or 1.15 power. That is to say, comparing two average cities, one twice as big as the other in population, the larger city will not have double the number of gas stations, but only 85% more than the smaller one. The larger city will have 115% higher wages, more doctors and lawyers, patents, GDP, number of cases of AIDS, crime and pollution. This scaling applies within all countries, but not across from one country to another.

The average half-life of companies is 10.5 years!And in any given year, the risk of a company disappearing (through bankruptcy, or merger, or acquisition) is the same, regardless of a company's size!

While cities become more diverse as they age and grow, companies do the opposite; they lose diversity, as they become more supportive of tried-and-true products in order to guarantee short-term returns. As companies grow, so too does their bureaucratic control. And, this is at the expense of innovation and R&D (Research and Development).

At times, the narrative deviates from scaling, and goes into various qualitative aspects of cities and companies. The author is rather opinionated in these areas, but his conjectures are interesting, though open to controversy. My only complaint about this book is that, while theoretical scaling laws in biology are developed and tested successfully against data, the book does not offer theoretical scaling laws for cities and companies. To some extent, these are more difficult to develop, because they depend on socio-economic structures and social networks. Data for these, especially for companies, are more difficult or expensive to obtain. Nevertheless, this book offers a wealth of information, and is endlessly fascinating. Highly recommended! ...more

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Aug 01, 2017 Charlene rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biology, chaos-complexity-emergence, ecology, evolution, favorites, information-theory, medicine, mindgasms, origins-of-life, physics

If you are only going to read one book on networks/ systems, let it be this. Whenever a physicist takes on the question of What is Life, like Erwin Schrödinger did in 1944, spectacular things come from it. Physicist Geoffrey West has carried on the Schrödinger tradition and given the world some serious food for thought.

This is probably going to be the longest review I have ever written because this is, without question, one of the most important books I have ever read and is an essential read f ...more

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Jul 08, 2017 Sebastien rated it it was amazing

Very well done popular science book. Explains concepts of scaling both from cellular, individual, to large system levels. Fascinating analysis on what kind of patterns and general rules we see with scaling in nature but also in human systems (cities, corporations, etc). I did this one in audiobook, kind of wish I'd done it in physical book format so I could have taken more notes/do more underlining. There are a lot of things mentioned in this book that I'd like to read up on and learn more about ...more

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Jul 25, 2017 Clif Hostetler rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science

Geoffrey West is a physicist who in this book has attempted to provide some modeling tools that will enable understanding and predicting the future directions of "highly complex systems" involving human behavior. He does this by first describing the scaling observations from the study of Allometric growth in the first part of the book, and then in the later parts of the book moving on to the fields of city planning, economics, and business with the assumption that their development and growth is Geoffrey West is a physicist who in this book has attempted to provide some modeling tools that will enable understanding and predicting the future directions of "highly complex systems" involving human behavior. He does this by first describing the scaling observations from the study of Allometric growth in the first part of the book, and then in the later parts of the book moving on to the fields of city planning, economics, and business with the assumption that their development and growth is analogous to biological growth. In the final section he suggests a path toward a "grand unified theory of sustainability."

I pause here to note that Goffrey West brags in the book's end notes that he has not used a single mathematical equation in the whole book. Some people will find that to be an attractive feature, but I found it a detriment. In my review that follows I have used an equation which I think succinctly summarizes a whole paragraph of words.

Allometric growth is the regular and systematic pattern of the size of any organ or part of the body in relation to the total size of the entire organism. An example to illustrate this is the difference in size between a cat and a mouse. Most people would guess that a cat that weighs 100 times more than a mouse requires 100 times more energy to sustain its life. This kind of linear extrapolation is incorrect. In fact, a cat that is 100 times heavier than a mouse requires only about 32 times as much energy to sustain it even though it has approximately 100 times as many cells. That rate of growth can be expressed with the exponent of 3/4 as follows:

100^(3 / 4) = 31.6227766 ≈ 32

The above relationship is called Kleiber's law and can be expressed more universally as follows:

Y = bx^α,
where Y = mass of the organ,
x = mass of the organism,
α = growth coefficient of the organ,
b = a constant.

It turns out that there are many different growth coefficients and curiously, the number 4 keeps showing up in the exponent.

There are probably well over fifty such scaling laws and another big surprise is their corresponding exponents the analog of the three quarters in Kleiber's law are invariably very close to simple multiples of one quarter.

For example, the exponent for growth rates is very close to 3/4, for lengths of aortas and genomes it's 1/4, the heights of trees 1/4, the cross-sectional areas of both aortas and tree trunks 3/4, for brain sizes 3/4, for cerebral white and gray matter 5/4, for heart rates minus 1/4, for mitochondrial densities in cells minus 1/4, for rates of evolution minus 1/4, for diffusion rates across membranes minus 1/4, for life spans 1/4 . . . and many, many more. The "minus" here simply indicates that the corresponding quantity decreases with size rather than increases, so, for instance, heart rates decrease with increasing body size following the 1/4 power law . . .

Geoffrey West provides an evaluation of these quantities and explains how the ratios are the result of biological evolution finding the most efficient size or quantity for these parameters, and that these scaling ratios could have been predicted on that basis.

His explanation for the repeated appearance of the number four is as follows:

It is the mathematical interplay between the cube root scaling law for lengths and the square root scaling law for radii, constrained by the linear scaling of blood volume and the invariance of the terminal units, that leads to quarter-power allometric exponents across organisms.

The resulting magic number four emerges as an effective extension of the usual three dimensions of the volume serviced by the network by an additional dimension resulting from the fractal nature of the network. . . . . . . natural selection has taken advantage of the mathematical marvels of fractal networks to optimize their distribution of energy so that organisms operate as if they were in four dimensions, rather than the canonical three. In this sense the ubiquitous number four is actually 3+1. More generally, it is the dimension of the space being serviced plus one.

Geoffrey West then takes a look at cities and considers their similarity to biological life. In the case of biological life the terminal (i.e.smallest) unit is the cell. For a city the terminal unit is a person. He proceeds to show evidence that cities become more efficient at the dissemination of information and the utilization of energy in proportion to their size at ratios (a.k.a. growth coefficients) that reflect those of biological beings.

There is one difference between cities and biological life. Living beings grow old and die, cities don't. At least cities don't die as long as there are plenty of young terminal units (i.e. people) available to replace those who die.

Then Geoffrey West evaluates the performance of business companies. I was surprised to learn that the average half life of businesses is less than ten years. In other words, on average they die (a.k.a. go bankrupt) young. For cities there seems to be no upper limit for their size to benefit from the benefits of being larger. This was not true for businesses. Their efficiencies seem to top out as they become very large.

The book closes with these words:

Given the special, unique role of cities as the originators of many of our present problems and their continuing role as the superexponential driver toward potential disaster, understanding their dynamics, growth, and evolution in a scientifically predictable, quantitative framework is crucial to achieving long-term sustainability on the planet. Perhaps of even greater importance for the immediate future is to develop such a theory within the context of a grand unified theory of sustainability by bringing together the multiple studies, simulations, databases, models, theories, and speculations concerning global warming, the environment, financial markets, risk, economies, health care, social conflict, and the myriad other characteristics of man as a social being interacting with his environment.

The book contains multiple graphs and charts which I found helpful. Many of the graphs in the book use logarithmic scaling which the books explains in excruciating detail.

My favorite quotation:

I have met scant few economists who do not automatically dismiss traditional Malthusian-like ideas of eventual or imminent collapse as naive, simplistic, or just plain wrong. On the other hand, I have met scant few physicists or ecologists who think it's nuts to believe otherwise. The late maverick economist Kenneth Boulding perhaps best summed it up when testifying before the U.S. Congress, declaring that "anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."

An interesting fact that I learned from the book:
The total number of heartbeats per life time on average is the same for all mammals. The hearts of larger long-lived mammals beat slower than small mammals, but the total number of beats over a lifespan is about the same. This was also true for human beings up until about two hundred years ago. Humans have since managed to double their lifespan, thus doubling the average number of lifetime heartbeats. ...more

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Oct 28, 2017 Phrodrick rated it really liked it

In rating Geoffrey West’s Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies a four star read; I am stating that I liked the book. However I have a lot of sympathy with those who are more critical. In the main I think he is on to something. I enjoyed what was for me an introduction to an effort to fit the laws of physics to other sciences, esp the biological sciences. This may be a very old effort, but the fact of In rating Geoffrey West’s Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies a four star read; I am stating that I liked the book. However I have a lot of sympathy with those who are more critical. In the main I think he is on to something. I enjoyed what was for me an introduction to an effort to fit the laws of physics to other sciences, esp the biological sciences. This may be a very old effort, but the fact of it is new to me.

I have to agree that West can be repetitious. Worse than that, I get the impression he will provide supporting proof for a few assertions and then uses the trust that engenders to make conclusions beyond his evidence. The deeper into Scale I read, the more suspicious I become of initial arguments.

A solid case can be made that the biological sciences, must conform to the rules of physics. It is a reasonable assumption to maintain that biological processes must conform to things like the laws of conservation of energy. Successful biological systems, mammalian or not should align with the laws of physics; esp as applied to fundamental activities like respiration, metabolism and decay. So far so good. But West knows that this approach is not so well developed to make it possible to offer more than “Coarse Grained” estimation and generalizations.

The further he moves from biological systems; specifically to corporate cycles, urban cycles and his version of a TOE, Theory of Everything. I got the impression that he has ever less solid science under his feet, and a determination to apply the tools he likes to whatever he is observing.
His fondness for the relative stability of cities, has him making no observations about those that collapse. His information about the life cycle of companies, does not always distinguish those that are bought out which likely were bought out because of their success, with those that go bankrupt.

These issues nag at me, yet I like this book. Mostly it is not technical. The writing style is, for me inviting and challenging without being too academic. Even if he does go beyond his evidence there is much here to leave you thinking.

Specific to climate change. I do not think he uses the expression. Instead he make the case that to the degree that humans have separated themselves for the more natural processes of a “Pristine” earth, the more we have taken upon ourselves the problem of sustainability. It is not reasonable that the earth can provide to specifically its human population an unlimited supply of the materials we now need for the relatively comfortable to extend our level of comfort to everybody or at ever increasing levels of comfort to an ever increasing number of humans.

All trends lines change. A fact he rarely mentions when discussing the log tables he so loves. Present technology depends on more than supplies of carbon burning energy – petroleum, coal, natural gas, etcetera. Other limitations include fresh water and rare earth metals. Items he lists more than once. Changes in technology may change dependence on rare earth metals, petroleum perhaps even water. This raises the question of how fast these changes can be developed, who will pay for them and what new costs will be imposed by these changes. West believes that these changes are likely to happen but also believes that such changes must come at an accelerating rate. Perhaps, let me think about it. ...more

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Sep 17, 2018 Brian Cloutier rated it it was ok

This book is frustrating, it has some really cool facts and a lot of his philosophy of science which I mostly appreciated. I feel like I'd really enjoy some of his papers. About 80% of this book is a waste of time though. He repeats himself in nearly every chapter. He frequently goes on 10-page irrelevant tangents. About 100 pages of the chapter on cities talks about sociology; it's framed as historical background which will help you explain his theory. By the end you realize it was just him cov This book is frustrating, it has some really cool facts and a lot of his philosophy of science which I mostly appreciated. I feel like I'd really enjoy some of his papers. About 80% of this book is a waste of time though. He repeats himself in nearly every chapter. He frequently goes on 10-page irrelevant tangents. About 100 pages of the chapter on cities talks about sociology; it's framed as historical background which will help you explain his theory. By the end you realize it was just him covering up for the the fact that he doesn't have a theory. The best he can do is to say something along the lines of: our brains are fractal and this causes our societies to be fractal and it makes a lot of sense to assume cities are fractal in reflection of this.

Let me save you from reading this book: Many properties of many different species can be predicted with surprising accuracy given just the size of the animal, in some weird sense you can see every animal as just a scaled version of some idealized animal. As animals increase in size these properties grow exponentially, with an exponent of some multiple of 1/4. This is because there are fundamental constraints involved with existing in 3D space. It turns out that space-filling fractals are the best way to fit things such as lungs and capillaries into 3D space. Since all life has independently optimized its metabolism: all life has discovered fractals. Space-filling fractals result in scaling laws with 1/4 exponents, and this causes many properties of species to follow the same scaling laws.

I wish I could tell you more, but he goes out of his way to avoid written equations. Mind you, the book contains quite a few equations! But instead of writing them down he explains them with prose; to get at an actual equation you have to work backwards from the explanations he gives of their consequences. Why do space-filling fractals result in scaling laws with 1/4 exponents? It apparently has something to do with fractals acting as if they're in 4D space but that part of the book has no citations.

His philosophy of science is nice, although not very novel and of course he repeats himself many times:

As Einstein wrote, "we followers of Spinoza see our God in the wonderful order and lawfulness of all that exists and in its soul as it reveals itself in man and animal". Regardless of one's belief system, there is something supremely grand and reassuring when one perceives even a tiny piece of the mystifyingly chaotic world around us conforming to regularities and principles that transcend its awesome complexity and seeming meaninglessness. As I argued earlier, analytic models such as the growth theory are deliberate oversimplifications of a more complex reality. Their utility depends on the extent to which they capture some fundamental essence of how nature works, the extent to which their assumptions are reasonable, their logic sound, and their simplicity or explanatory power and internal consistency in agreement with observations. (page 172)

Science at its best is the search for commonalities, regularities, principles, and universalities that transcend and underlie the structure and behavior of any particular individual constituent. [...] And it is at its very best when it can do that in a quantitative, mathematically computational, predictive framework. (page 269)

...more

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Nov 10, 2017 aPriL does feral sometimes rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: academic-notations, twisted-my-synapses-peculiar, science, illuminating, non-fiction

'Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies' surprised me. I learned so much from this book!

Why can we live up to 120 years, but not 1,000? (laws of Thermodynamics)

Why do mice live for up to 2 to 3 years, and elephants live up to 75? (laws of Thermodynamics)

Why do organisms and ecosystems from cells to whales to forests scale with size in a predictable fashion? (Underlying universal math principles of biol ...more

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Oct 05, 2017 Jurgen Appelo rated it it was amazing

Shelves: complex-systems

Finally, some actual science, rather than opinions, about the issues of scaling complex systems.

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Feb 13, 2018 Katia N rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: economics-and-history

I am a little impartial to this book as it reminded me my uncle who is a nuclear physicist and our conversations in his kitchen whether economics is a science and other very interesting topics (not not directly related to physics). This book is written by the physicist who spent the last 20 years of his career investigating something which is not directly related to physics.

I like how physicists are looking at this world. I sympathise totally with their practical approach and attempts to explai ...more

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Jun 18, 2017 Dan Graser rated it it was amazing

This is one of those very rare "big-science" books that actually accomplishes the fiendishly difficult double-act of maintaining a firm grasp on its explanatory power without going overboard into tedious philosophizing while at the same time actually delivering on the broad sweep and revelatory promise of its telos.

Noted physicist, former director of the Santa Fe Institute, and expositor of complexity theory Geoffrey West introduces several concepts of physics, biology, urban development, busine ...more

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Sep 14, 2017 Jeanette rated it really liked it

I would have given this 5 stars except it was enough over my head that I couldn't quite grasp all the connotations. The fault is in the telling too at times, it is dry. But so filled with pure gold that you don't mind digging. All of it deposited around the allometric power laws.

This is one of those "what's it all about Alfie" books. But far, far better than most of them are. It is an interdisciplinary approach, strong on the physics. But includes so much of other philosophies or psychology of t I would have given this 5 stars except it was enough over my head that I couldn't quite grasp all the connotations. The fault is in the telling too at times, it is dry. But so filled with pure gold that you don't mind digging. All of it deposited around the allometric power laws.

This is one of those "what's it all about Alfie" books. But far, far better than most of them are. It is an interdisciplinary approach, strong on the physics. But includes so much of other philosophies or psychology of thought (cognition) and their practical applications in the real world- that it would be impossible for me to clearly categorize it here. Beyond my ability, but I will try.

It's awesome! Probably could have been edited more rigidly, but the intersects would also have been less obvious?

I'm going to buy it and peruse different parts when they have more relevance to my particular passages. But as I age, some of them are gleaming nuggets to ponder.

He has a 5 or 6 star mind. But many will not grasp the first assumptions he makes? Possibly? He is in many ways a non-linear thinker. So I'm pretty sure that many laypeople, especially those who serve or work "out of the sciences" might not understand the interplay. Perhaps not even understand the difficult language or equivalencies? I didn't get them all and had to use some word research on the side.

Dense, dense reading.

But I picked up some gems that I never knew before this book. Which makes it 5 stars plus for when the life "windows" are so widely pulled open. Making less chaos out of a ultimately complex world.

Brunel- all about him and that awesome and very short life. Civil engineering and so much of what was "true" before him, wasn't. How linear and non-linear thinking works in the present day of "we think" agendas and power propaganda. And how emotion colors that process. Especially on what is taught as "truth". As if consensus means reality! And how linear thinking has butted against science and its research to approximate the reality of this planet and the wider universe in the past and still does. (How there can never be a physical body like King Kong's or Godzilla's, for instance. Despite the movies making him agile.)

Also why cities go on and on and rarely, rarely ever die. While companies, businesses of every persuasion and corporate forms always die. And quite quickly in most cases. (This part gave me hope for Chicago which is in a strong reversal decline after a stagnation plus period, but will rebound. But very differently to the individual style owned before.)

That all animals/humans too have nearly identical numbers of heart beats in their "average" or norm lifespans, despite the number of years those species may live or the size/weight of their physical bodies. And why! Handfuls of these golden nuggets in each chapter, IMHO.

If you read it, know you will have spent time and time and time on this project. That's why I am going to buy it and share it too. Despite knowing that those in mid-life will never have enough extra leisure hours to spent on this one for quite some years. ...more

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Dec 04, 2018 Thomas Ray rated it it was ok

Shelves: detailed-reviews, bad

Throws lots of ideas at us.

False data. One of his introductory graphs is of company size vs. income. Shows income near $1 million/year for a 1-person company. If true, we'd all do it. For his fraction-of-people-surviving-this-long-vs.-age graphs, he gives us a smooth curve, then a stairstep one, for the same thing--he wants to identify supposed causes of death, so he redraws the curve to fit what he wants to say. Early in the book there's a plot showing all animals have essentially 1 billion hea ...more

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Dec 02, 2017 Matt rated it it was ok

Bloated. Get to the point!

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Jun 24, 2017 Mengsen Zhang rated it really liked it

Throughout eastern and western philosophy and mysticism, the analogy between one's body and a city has been a cardinal theme, and contemplating on this analogy may be a means to a deeper understanding of the world (e.g. Plato in Republic using this analogy to talk about "justice", or "the city of nine gates" in Hinduism). This kind of cross-scale analogy has stirred up the curiosity of many, including myself.
Remarkably, here Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist, took a scientific and quantita Throughout eastern and western philosophy and mysticism, the analogy between one's body and a city has been a cardinal theme, and contemplating on this analogy may be a means to a deeper understanding of the world (e.g. Plato in Republic using this analogy to talk about "justice", or "the city of nine gates" in Hinduism). This kind of cross-scale analogy has stirred up the curiosity of many, including myself.
Remarkably, here Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist, took a scientific and quantitative approach to demonstrate where animals and cities are the same and where they are different. The comparisons are all based on a rather simple property: how the energy turnover (or "metabolism") of systems (e.g. multicellular organisms, cities, companies) scale with system size. West shows a surprisingly universal Power Law relation (log-log linear relation between metabolism rate and system size) across systems at very different scales and of very different constituents, where the "Power" (or slope on log-log scale) is highly indicative of the system's underlying network structures (fractal property of vascular or social networks) and dynamics (growth and death). And the specific value of this "Power" have great implications for medicine and the overall sustainability of human society. It would be a bit taxing to summarize this book in full scope, so I'm just going to say: this book showcases decades of solid work on natural scaling. If you are looking to read a popular introduction to Power Law, this is so far the book.
That being said, with all my admiration, I think that the universality of certain scaling laws should be taken with a grain of salt. For example, I notice that many of log-log plot in the book are not technically linear (especially regarding cities and companies), but rather appears as a nonlinear function with a regime where it can be approximated linearly. For another example, in chapter 3 section 4 "universality and the magic number four that controls life"*, you will notice that the quarter power laws are illustrated in separate domains rather than as a continuum. That brings me some questions: with all possible scaling functions, what is the true proportion of linear regimes? Are the nonlinear, or say, inter-linear regimes not interesting? Are we missing some big pictures? Maybe I just don't know enough. Maybe after reading West's academic publications all doubts will be dispelled. Until then, I will remain skeptic.
* (This title also got me a bit wary. How far would one go in calling a number multiples of 1/4? If you refer to some concrete numbers provided in chapter 4, you will start to wonder.)
Speaking egocentrically, I'm quite frustrated with elusiveness of the presentation of theories in this book, perhaps partly due to West's absolute avoidance of any equation. I do think the clearest way to describe scaling relations is to complement those figures with (minimal but nonzero amount of) grade-school level math (in footnote or appendix). In fact, West's equation avoidance was so extreme that he spent paragraphs narrating equations in words (thing a is just thing b times thing c divided by thing d), just didn't like to print out the actual equation with the benefit of visual clarity. With or without math, I'm walking away without a really clear picture of the physics/theories behind those scaling laws (first four chapter on biological scaling is clearer, but the later chapters on cities and companies got pretty foggy, especially the word "network" itself carry very different meanings in these two domains). I will trade many interesting digressions in book for a more detailed account of the physics/mechanism, especially when many important academic references are behind paywalls.
But after all, this is still a very good book that every student of complexity science should read!
...more

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Mar 24, 2018 Adam Smith rated it it was ok

While the concept of a mathematical formulation of biological scaling laws outlined in the first few chapters is interesting, unfortunately I did not like the style of this book and found it increasingly irritating as it went on. Some of things that annoyed me:

Fawning descriptions of people the author has worked with and a general humble brag style of writing.
Excessive use of pretentious words like 'concomitant'
Patronising descriptions of how exponentials work, or pointless examples of basic mat ...more

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Aug 12, 2017 Gary Beauregard Bottomley rated it liked it · review of another edition

We live in a complex world. As the author says in the book, the bible is based on "opinions, intuition, and prejudices" and is up to us to determine if "life has meaning or is without purpose". For us to bring order out of the chaos we need a narrative to hold the story together. The author tries to tie together all the items that are in the subtitle of the book into a coherent universal truth about the world by seeing the world as a recursive holistic entity tied together by a scaling parameter We live in a complex world. As the author says in the book, the bible is based on "opinions, intuition, and prejudices" and is up to us to determine if "life has meaning or is without purpose". For us to bring order out of the chaos we need a narrative to hold the story together. The author tries to tie together all the items that are in the subtitle of the book into a coherent universal truth about the world by seeing the world as a recursive holistic entity tied together by a scaling parameter expressed through emergent properties. The author speaks trenchantly on each of the topics and ties each of the topics together with his universal way of seeing the world with his system wide approach for understanding.

We live in a non-linear world but we always intuitively think linearly (oh I felt for that poor elephant who was given a too large of dose of LSD). When we scale we default simplistically by using a linear interpolation. Most of the world is not best modeled linearly (this is why we have statisticians). The author takes our false default position and refines it by adjusting for the dimensionality between area (2 dimensions) and volume (3 dimensions) and adding a dimension for the fractal (recursive) nature inherent within all systems and making the power function such that every doubling means a corresponding increase of 168 % (i.e. 2 to the 3/4 power). The core of the author's theory lies within that power function or variations of it.

He never really talks down to his readers and moves the story fairly fast. He speaks statistics fluently but doesn't use a single equation within the book to intimidate math phobic readers. When there is randomness in the creation of a system there will always be an exponential distribution. Just think of a young boy sitting on a dock fishing. The number of fish the boy catches in a very short time will never be more than one. The time between catching the fish will always be an 'exponential distribution' (and the number of fish the boy catches will follow a Poisson Distribution, poisson is fish in French). All I needed to establish those very special distributions was independence and identically distributed events at a subsystem level (and a few other non specified and minor regulatory conditions). The author takes this fact about the real world and uses it to create the self similarity inherent within subsystems across a network. The author gives an example about aging that illustrates the magical properties inherent within this special distribution and why it is so special and is worth knowing about. (My favorite fiction book, "Gravity's Rainbow" does that too and I highly recommend that book).

The author is a polymath. He drops a lot of philosophers names and usually that annoys me, because most writers who do that don't seem to know anything beyond the name that they dropped. This author seemed to understand the connections. Aristotle (who he mentions, but mostly for his politics not his metaphysics) would see the world in terms of 'whatness' or 'thatness', the universal verse the particular, or like Spinoza (who the author mentions multiple times) the quantitative verse the qualitative. The author wants to take the intuition (the narrative, the story we tell to understand our place in the universe) and replace it with analytic truths. He'll say at the end of the book, that 'more data is better, but less data is best' because a theory that connects is most powerful of all. He brings up Kepler's laws based on Tycho Brahe's data sets, Kepler developed his laws (rules) by intuiting the data to a set of rules (going from the particular to the general, the 'thatness' to the 'whatness') which explained the data but doesn't identify the first principles, and the author contrasted that with Newton's Laws which tell how things necessarily are based on a priori truth leading to understanding of the particular from the general. The author seeks understanding of the universal whatness in the style of Newton.

The author wants to establish a universal holistic systems understanding of the world through analytical truths. (I would recommend the movie available on Youtube, "Mindwalk" for anyone who is interested in these kind of things. The movie is based on a Fritjof Capra book but not his famous book "Tao of Physics" and Liv Ullmann and Mont St. Michael are always beautiful to behold). Within the author's theory there was an unfolding of the necessity of evolutionary theory similar to Alfred Whitehead's as expressed in the delightful lecture "The Function of Reason", and parts of Nietzsche's 'eternal recurrence of the identical will to power', a way of seeing the world such that everything that is is that way because it has to be. The self similarity inherent within all systems as expressed by the author would fit within a Nietzscheian frame work of the world, but the author doesn't connect those dots.

The author is bothered by the 'finite time singularity' that he thinks we're coming to. His thoughts on economic growth overlap with Robert Gordon's book "The Rise and Fall of American Growth". They both seem to lean towards that spectacular innovation is behind us. That's just their opinion and I respect that even though my opinion lies differently (I'm more optimistic, maybe foolishly, but that's just my opinion). Both books, had a bigger problem for me. Both covered too many topics all of which I'm very interested in and consequently have read many books on the topics and the books seldom told me things that I was not already aware of. Authors should always assume that readers are interested in the topic and tell us things we don't already know from recently published books. ...more

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Nov 10, 2019 Andy rated it did not like it · review of another edition

For people who don’t know science, this could be an OK introduction to fractals and Galileo and whatnot, but even then the book is just too filled with meandering self-congratulatory anecdotes about the author and random repetitions. There are a few interesting graphs and factoids that are worth pondering. But as other Goodreads reviews have pointed out, there are some problems with those astounding graphs.
One issue is the human lifespan stuff. We live longer than cows (for example) but accordi ...more

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Jul 26, 2017 Daniel Frank rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Scale is a very interesting book with a huge amount of insights and fascinating information. Geoffrey West is clearly brilliant. However, the book is pedantic and verbose, and badly needs an editor (which makes it quite humorous that the book was edited by Cormac McCarthy). While many people might enjoy the content of this book, this book is unlikely to be readable by the lay person interested in science due to its complexity and poor writing.

Scaling is an important concept, and I'm glad West dr ...more

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Mar 07, 2020 jrendocrine rated it it was amazing

This is a really enjoyable book, superbly written by a theoretical physicist that has applied himself to size and growth of biological and human defined constructions. I especially loved the first half, which is about metabolic scaling in organisms (metabolic rate, strength, blood supply). This should be taught in medical school. For example, the fact that metabolism decreases as animal size increases is provocative - - thus mice live faster have more cancer than whales (who have basically none) ...more

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Sep 16, 2017 Mehrsa rated it really liked it

Really fascinating primer (and more) on complexity theory. He talks about the universal rules that govern growth--for people, cities, companies. Bad news for Peter Thiel and the Silicon Valley bros who are trying to overcome dying and some terrible news at the end for humanity. He resurrects some of the Malthusian predictions about population growth. It's a fascinating book and I can't wait to read more from
Complexity scientists. If I have a criticism, it was too long ...more

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Oct 02, 2017 Lew Watts rated it it was amazing

I first met Geoff West for coffee in Santa Fe. At the time, I was deeply involved in network theory, principally linked to innovation processes. But what I really wanted was an opportunity to learn the genesis of his landmark series of papers on scaling laws in biology. At the end of this review is a haibun I wrote on the meeting that was published in Contemporary Haibun Online, in April, 2015.
West's early papers, co-authored with James Brown and Brian Enquist, have spawned a myriad of works, ex I first met Geoff West for coffee in Santa Fe. At the time, I was deeply involved in network theory, principally linked to innovation processes. But what I really wanted was an opportunity to learn the genesis of his landmark series of papers on scaling laws in biology. At the end of this review is a haibun I wrote on the meeting that was published in Contemporary Haibun Online, in April, 2015.
West's early papers, co-authored with James Brown and Brian Enquist, have spawned a myriad of works, extending scaling laws beyond biology into almost every fabric of our lives. This work, and the potential for further discoveries, are summarized and discussed in this seminal book that should be essential reading for anyone interested in what makes this world tick. As a scientist, I longed for the occasional equation to circumvent pages of explanatory narrative. Indeed, this is the one criticism of this magnificent book, that it is sometimes repetitive and long-winded. But then, it was always West's intention to make this available to the non-scientist, and from most of the reviews I have read, he has achieved this. Buy it, read it, read it again, and luxuriate in the wonder of scaling.

And here is the haibun...

WE ARE VESSELS FILLED BY A 3-DIMENSIONAL FRACTAL OF VESICLES

That is Geoff West summarizing one conclusion from his mathematical paper* on why animals show a consistent scaling phenomenon. I nod uncertainly over my coffee, but decide to ask him for a simpler insight that I can share with some of my non-scientific friends.

“Tell them this,” he says, “that sometimes you need a key, a way to unlock two seemingly unrelated observations. For example, large animals have slow heartbeats, yet small animals have fast heartbeats—why? Then again, small animals live for a short time whereas large animals can live for many years—why? When all is said and done, it’s because our vascular systems age. You see, all animals live for around one and a half billion heartbeats.”

Tick tock …

final days …
driving through aspens dad asks
are we there yet

*The Origin of Universal Scaling Laws in Biology, by Geoffrey B. West, James H. Brown and Brian J. Enquist, in Scaling in Biology, Oxford University Press, 2000.
...more

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Jan 10, 2021 Stetson rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, biomedical-science, science-journalism, natural-sciences, data-statistics

Scale is Geoffrey West's ambitious attempt to synthesize a universal theory of scaling (i.e. how things grow, shrink, change) for a lay audience. As West would admit, this framing is somewhat grandiose and purposefully over-claimed (to excite and provoke readers), but generally West's research findings are deeply intriguing and merit serious consideration (from laypeople and scientists). Part of West's angle is quantitatively examining dynamical systems (organisms, cities, economies, etc) using Scale is Geoffrey West's ambitious attempt to synthesize a universal theory of scaling (i.e. how things grow, shrink, change) for a lay audience. As West would admit, this framing is somewhat grandiose and purposefully over-claimed (to excite and provoke readers), but generally West's research findings are deeply intriguing and merit serious consideration (from laypeople and scientists). Part of West's angle is quantitatively examining dynamical systems (organisms, cities, economies, etc) using a "coarse-grained" perspective (basically a stepped-back, low resolution view). He's a theoretical physicist but applies his mathematical mind (with colleagues) to problems of economics, biology, city planning, etc. Some of the insights produced by this approach are truly fascinating.

I'm not eager to rigorously evaluate every claim made by West as he is generally right. His approach is quite powerful. In fact, I wish Scale explored the practical implications and applications of West's work a bit more. I can forgive this oversight because West is primarily concerned with theory and the philosophy of science. However, some phenomena are better suited for his approaches than others. His claims concerning organisms and allometry are probably the most persuasively and rigorous supported, while the claims concerning how cities, economies, and companies scale are a little more dubious (though they shouldn't be dismissed or ignored).

Of the critical philosophical issues raised by West's work, maybe the most salient concerns the race between human populations (economic growth) and natural resources. Can we grow forever on a plant with finite resources? Is our pace of growth sustainable? The Malthusians and eco-activists say "NO," while the futurists say "OF COURSE!" West comes down somewhere in the middle, criticizing both sides for prior or current oversights. However, it seems the historical record and current trends/developments suggest that the futurists/techno-utopians are winning the argument at this moment and by quite a bit. There is, of course, some upper limit (at least for human populations on earth itself), but it is far from clear that we are anywhere close to this upper limit. Moreover, West's discussion here doesn't seem to account for possible unforeseen developments or even account for how much human behavior and culture is changing as society advances and grows (mentions declining fertility rates and population flux back toward cities but his discussion doesn't explore these trends). West's coarse-grained approach inevitably misses some important factors though West's caution is reasonable.

Ultimately, Scale is definitely a book worth reading and probably more than once!

...more

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May 28, 2017 Kim rated it it was amazing

This is an amazing book with a broad perspective on the statistical foundations of how things are born, grow, and die. Beyond just the life of plants and animals it expands its thinking into the life cycles of economies, corporations, and cities (the last of these apparently being the only immortal entity on the list).

Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist and former president of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Ten or fifteen years ago he began to wonder whether the mathematics of his d This is an amazing book with a broad perspective on the statistical foundations of how things are born, grow, and die. Beyond just the life of plants and animals it expands its thinking into the life cycles of economies, corporations, and cities (the last of these apparently being the only immortal entity on the list).

Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist and former president of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Ten or fifteen years ago he began to wonder whether the mathematics of his discipline could be applied to other sciences. He found a major gap in the study of biology where there was a great deal of information gathering and identification but few attempts to answer questions out of the information gathered using statistics. West wanted to see if there could be insights into some of the fundamental questions of biology. Why do things die? Why can animals only reach certain sizes, and beyond that how did whales become so big?

In biology he found startling comparisons, that the arterial systems of animals compare in design and scale to plants and trees. He found that arterial systems branch out uniformly to the point that blood stops surging but flows through capillary branches. He found the math almost identical to the way limbs and channels branched off in trees until reaching the constant flow in leaves. He learned that animals have nearly identical systems, from the smallest shrew to the whale, and that once you know, say, the size of kidneys in one you can calculate the same in other animals. More importantly, perhaps, he notes that the increased size of animals creates efficiencies so that an animal that is double the size of another needs far less than double the caloric energy.

This efficiency of scale transfers using the same mathematical constants to non-living entities. West found that cities grow at the same uniform scales, so that knowing the population of a city will allow you to make calculations on statistics such as the number of attorneys, the number of restaurants, the number of residential units, etc., with only small variations on some items that will define the unique personality of a city.

West also found comparisons of scale for corporations, with great similarities among all sizes, and identified a life cycle of birth, growth, and death lasting around half a century for those that survived the first five years.

Because the math used in all the different areas is consistent it's easy to grasp (even for this liberal arts major) and it's fascinating to watch these ideas redevelop in areas that seem so widely divergent.

West is a personable writer and includes information about how these discoveries were worked out with researchers in the different fields and even occasional talk about his children, such as calculating quantities of medications for his infant son.

There are also enlightening discussions on logarithmic scales and visualizations to help understand what exponential means and the alarming things it could mean for population growth.

The book moves from topic to topic with just enough time spent on each so the reader feels neither cheated nor overwhelmed in each, with every section building on the last. It's an excellent book for anyone interested in health, public policy, economics, or management. ...more

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Sep 12, 2017 Daniel rated it it was amazing

Geoffrey West is a prominent and elderly scientist working at the Santa Fe Institute, the centre of interdisciplinary research. This book was easy for the layman to understand and was extensive in scope. It turned out that fractals can explain a lot of complex systems using quite simple equations.

0. Why can't we have a real life Godzilla? The weight increase proportionately with size but the support increases less quickly with size. So a Godzilla will collapse under his own weight.

1. Why do bi Geoffrey West is a prominent and elderly scientist working at the Santa Fe Institute, the centre of interdisciplinary research. This book was easy for the layman to understand and was extensive in scope. It turned out that fractals can explain a lot of complex systems using quite simple equations.

0. Why can't we have a real life Godzilla? The weight increase proportionately with size but the support increases less quickly with size. So a Godzilla will collapse under his own weight.

1. Why do big animals live longer? Because the larger the animal, the slower the metabolic rate. So aging is also slower. So metabolic rate increases sublinearly with size. We human beings however are abnormal, living double what our size would have predicted us to live.

2. Why do trees, broccoli and blood vessels branch out in a similar fashion? Because the most efficient energy rule states that the ratio of the total area of the big artery and the branches are fixed. But the artery system of mammals consists of big ones with pulsating waves and the capillaries with constant flow, thus to be efficient there are size limits. So we cannot have miniature mammals.

3. Why can we not live forever? We start disintegrating from the start. Our growth rate was fast when we were young but eventually the cost of maintaining the body becomes higher than the gain in metabolic rate. So we age and die, typically around 120 years max.

4. Why do cities grow? The GDP per capita, patents per capita grow faster than the growth of population. So cities grow superlinearly. That's why even bombing a city cannot destroy it. On the other hand companies grow less fast than its size. So it would first grow, then stabilise, then die.

5. As cities gain super-exponentially, there will come a point in time when it reaches 'singularity'. Then it should collapse. So far we had been avoiding it by innovation. Can we continue this forever? The author thinks it unlikely.

The last part of the book boasted the Santa Fe Institute, and attacked big data thinking. He thinks that the new way forward must combine traditional scientific thinking and big data.

This is a must read book for anyone who wants to understand the universal laws governing growth! ...more

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Sep 07, 2017 Oswaldo De Freitas rated it liked it

Interesting and insightful ideas, but the explanations are repetitive and propagandistic.
I have struggled to finish.
Moreover, the book will need serious revision for the next editions: prof. West have mistaken RPM to express number of turn, efficiency for productivity, productivity for production, and so on. Also some basic concepts were reshaped to support the claimed hidden simple proportions: risk of death is not constant along the life whether the subject is a turtle or a human being; rathe ...more

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Jan 13, 2021 Luciano rated it really liked it

A fascinating book about the ubiquity of exponential scaling in biological and social systems and its origins in relatively simple physical principles. The breadth of West's research and curiosity is mindboggling and probably we won't have answers to much of the questions he raises in our lifetimes, but it's fascinating, at least to social scientists like myself, to follow attempts to use physics (probably the "hardest" science) to look at cities, companies, economic growth, and sustainability. ...more

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Aug 28, 2018 Sten Tamkivi rated it it was amazing

Shelves: own-digital, science, non-fiction

A gripping popular science take on mathematical scaling laws of complex systems. From how the lifetime heartbeat count of mammals is virtually a constant, how the surface area of blood vessel connections is related to why Godzilla is not possible, and how all these relatively simple growth curves and ceilings relate to scaling of social organisms (from companies to cities).

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Jan 15, 2020 Graeme Newell rated it it was ok

Shelves: overdrive

The premise behind this book was fascinating. All organisms follow precise predictable mathematical laws as they increase in size. Cities, people, animal biology, anything that organizes in groups follows these laws. Thus, it is possible to accurately predict the consumption habits, energy usage and resources required to keep that organism alive.

In the first chapters, West lays out the specifics of this fascinating law of nature and shows just how pervasive it is. He also shows just how darn us ...more

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Oct 11, 2017 Leo Walsh rated it it was amazing

An absolutely captivating book, Scale by Geoffery West illustrates what science does so well: uncovering the signal, the truth, from the noise.

West applies his physicist's mind, trained in using mathematics to discern patterns hidden in nature, to reveal truths never-expected about biology, urban planning, and economics. Along the way, he addresses some basic maths (like power laws, network theory, fractal geometry and dimensionality, and preferential attachment) for the lay reader.

But what's ...more

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Nov 29, 2017 Alex Zakharov rated it really liked it

Gotta give it to Geoffrey West, the man thinks big and broad, and he authoritatively presents an overarching quantifiable framework of looking at growth in organisms, cities and companies. In order to do so he brings together power laws, fractals, network theory, biology, economics, and social dynamics. It is a fun ride and I learned and re-learned quite a bit, particularly when it comes to allometric scaling.

A good chunk of the first half is on metabolism and networks in biology and it is the ...more

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“While exponential growth is a remarkable manifestation of our extraordinary accomplishments as a species, built into it are the potential seeds of our demise and the portent of big troubles just around the next corner.” — 3 likes

“We need to understand how the dynamics of innovation, technological advances, urbanization, financial markets, social networks, and population dynamics are interconnected and how their evolving interrelationships fuel growth and societal change—and, as manifestations of human endeavors, how they are all integrated into a holistic interacting systemic framework . . . and whether such a dynamically evolving system is ultimately sustainable.” — 2 likes

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