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

by Geoffrey West

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.”