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

by Geoffrey West

Equally surprising is that they scale sublinearly as functions of their size, rather than superlinearly like socioeconomic metrics in cities. In this sense, companies are much more like organisms than cities. The scaling exponent for companies is around 0.9, to be compared with 0.85 for the infrastructure of cities and 0.75 for organisms.

In this new world of artifacts we inevitably became conditioned to seeing it through the lens of Euclidian geometry—straight lines, smooth curves, and smooth surfaces—blinding ourselves, at least as scientists and technologists, to the seemingly messy, complex, convoluted world of the environment from which we had emerged. This was mostly left to the imagination of artists and writers. Although measurement plays a central role in this new, more regular artificial world, it has the elegant simplicity of Euclid, so there is no need to be concerned with awkward questions like that of resolution. In this new world, a length is a length is a length, and that’s it. Not so, however, in the immediate “natural” world around us, which is highly complex and dominated by crinkles, wrinkles, and crenulations. As Mandelbrot succinctly put it: “Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.”

A general argument to address this can be made by recognizing that, in addition to minimizing energy loss, natural selection has also led to a maximization of metabolic capacity because metabolism produces the energy and materials required to sustain and reproduce life.1 This has been achieved by maximizing surface areas across which resources and energy are transported. These surfaces are in actuality the total surface areas of all the terminal units of the network. For instance, all of our metabolic energy is transmitted across the total surface area of all of our capillaries to fuel our cells, just as the metabolism of a tree is governed by the transmission of energy gathered from sunlight through all of its leaves to fuel photosynthesis and of water from soil through all of the terminal fibers of its root system.

and that it would scale superlinearly in much the same way that other

concepts and ideas implicit in a lot of the problems and questions considered in this book: concepts like information, emergence, accidents, historical contingency, adaptation, and selection, all characteristics of complex adaptive systems whether organisms, societies, ecosystems, or economies.