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

by Geoffrey West

This is the curse of consciousness. We all know we are going to die. No other organism is burdened with the enormity of the conscious knowledge that it has a finite lifetime and that its individual existence is eventually and inevitably coming to an end. No creature, whether a bacterium, an ant, a rhododendron, or a salmon, “cares” or even “knows” about dying; they live and they die, participating in the continual struggle for existence by propagating their genes into future generations and playing the endless game of the survival of the fittest. So do we. But over the last few thousand years, we have emerged as the consciousness and conscience of the evolutionary process and begun the extraordinary adventure of contemplating its meaning by bringing ideas of morality, caring, rationality, the soul, the spirit, and the gods to the universe.