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

by Geoffrey West

Out of this melting pot, each species evolves with its suite of physiological traits and characteristics that reflect its unique path through evolutionary time, resulting in the extraordinary diversity and variation across the spectrum of life from bacteria to whales. So after many millions of years of evolutionary tinkering and adaptation, of playing the game of the survival of the fittest, we human beings have ended up walking on two legs, being around five to six feet high, living for up to one hundred years, having a heart that beats about sixty times a minute, with a systolic blood pressure of about 100 mm Hg, sleeping about eight hours a day, an aorta that’s about eighteen inches long, having about five hundred mitochondria in each of our liver cells, and a metabolic rate of about 90 watts.

Average human being