Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies

by Geoffrey West

In his pioneering work, Kleiber surveyed the metabolic rates for a spectrum of animals ranging from a small dove weighing about 150 grams to a large steer weighing almost 1,000 kilograms. Over the ensuing years his analysis has been extended by many researchers to include the entire spectrum of mammals ranging from the smallest, the shrew, to the largest, the blue whale, thereby covering more than eight orders of magnitude in mass. Remarkably, and of equal importance, the same scaling has been shown to be valid across all multicellular taxonomic groups including fish, birds, insects, crustacea, and plants, and even to extend down to bacteria and other unicellular organisms.6 Overall, it encompasses an astonishing twenty-seven orders of magnitude, perhaps the most persistent and systematic scaling law in the universe.