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

by Geoffrey West

This leads to the fascinating conclusion that across the spectrum of life all biological rates and times such as those associated with growth, embryonic development, longevity, and evolutionary processes are determined by a joint universal scaling law in terms of just two parameters: the number ¼, arising from the network constraints that control the dependence on mass, and 0.65 eV, originating in the chemical reaction dynamics of ATP production. This result can be restated in a slightly different way: when adjusted for size and temperature, as determined by just these two numbers, all organisms run to a good approximation by the same universal clock with similar metabolic, growth, and evolutionary rates.