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

by Geoffrey West

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.