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

by Geoffrey West

Particularly fascinating is the emergence of the number four in the guise of the ¼ powers that appear in all of these exponents. It occurs ubiquitously across the entire panoply of life and seems to play a special, fundamental role in determining many of the measurable characteristics of organisms regardless of their evolved design. Viewed through the lens of scaling, a remarkably general universal pattern emerges, strongly suggesting that evolution has been constrained by other general physical principles beyond natural selection. These systematic scaling relationships are highly counterintuitive. They show that almost all the physiological characteristics and life-history events of any organism are primarily determined simply by its size.