In the case of cities, we would therefore expect the emergent scaling laws to exhibit much greater variance around idealized power laws than organisms do, because the time over which evolutionary forces have acted is so much shorter. Comparing fits to scaling in the two cases, such as Figure 1 for animal metabolic rates versus Figure 3 for the patent production in cities, confirms this prediction: there is a consistently larger spread around the fits for cities than for organisms. Extrapolating this to companies where “evolutionary” timescales are even shorter suggests that if they do indeed
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