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

by Geoffrey West

Unfortunately, however, there is another serious catch. Theory dictates that such discoveries must occur at an increasingly accelerating pace; the time between successive innovations must systematically and inextricably get shorter and shorter. For instance, the time between the “Computer Age” and the “Information and Digital Age” was perhaps twenty years, in contrast to the thousands of years between the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages. If we therefore insist on continuous open-ended growth, not only does the pace of life inevitably quicken, but we must innovate at a faster and faster rate. We are all too familiar

the catch

bodies contain only about half a pound (about 250 g) of ATP, but here’s something truly extraordinary that you should know about yourself: every day you typically make about 2 × 1026 ATP molecules—that’s two hundred trillion trillion molecules—corresponding to a mass of about 80 kilograms (about 175 lbs.). In other words, each day you produce and recycle the equivalent of your own body weight of ATP! Taken together, all of these ATPs add up to meet our total metabolic needs at the

I. Space Filling The idea behind the concept of space filling is simple and intuitive. Roughly speaking, it means

III. Optimization The final postulate states that the continuous multiple feedback and fine-tuning mechanisms implicit in the ongoing processes of natural selection and which have been playing out over enormous periods of time have led to the network performance being “optimized.” So, for example, the energy used by the heart

This condition of nonreflectivity is called impedance matching. It has multiple applications not only in the working of your body but across a very broad spectrum of technologies that play an important part in your daily life. For example, telephone network systems use matched impedances to minimize echoes on long-distance lines;

decipher the famous Rosetta Stone now sitting in the British Museum in London. As a fitting tribute to this remarkable man, Andrew Robinson wrote a spirited biography of Young titled The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, the Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, Cured the Sick, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Among Other Feats of Genius. I have a certain soft spot for Young because he was born in Milverton, in the county of Somerset in the West of England,

In his latest incarnation Godzilla is 350 feet long, which translates into a weight of about 20,000 tons, about 100 times heavier than the biggest blue whales. To support this gargantuan amount of tissue Godzilla would have to eat about 25 tons of food a day, corresponding to a metabolic rate of about 20 million food calories a day, the food requirements of a small town of 10,000 people. His heart, which would weigh about 100 tons and have a diameter of about 50 feet, would have to pump almost 2 million liters of blood around his body. However, to counterbalance that, it would have to beat only just over a couple of times a minute and sustain a blood pressure similar to ours. Note, by the way, that his heart alone is comparable in size to an entire blue whale. His aorta through which this enormous amount of blood flows would be about 10 feet across, easily big enough for us to walk through quite comfortably. Godzilla might live for up to two thousand years and would need to sleep less than an hour a day. Relatively speaking, he would have a tiny brain representing less than 0.01 percent of his body weight, compared with the approximately 2 percent of ours. This doesn’t mean that he would be stupid, but that’s all he would need to carry out all of his neurological and physiological functions. As to the possibly less savory parts of his life, he would need to pee about 20,000 liters of urine a day, comparable to the size of a small swimming pool, and poop about 3 tons of fec...

extraordinary unity and interconnectivity of life that is revealed through this lens to be spiritually elevating in the pantheistic spirit articulated by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. As Einstein wrote,10 “We followers of Spinoza see our God in the wonderful order and lawfulness of all that exists and in its soul as it reveals itself in man and animal.” Regardless of one’s belief system, there is something supremely grand and reassuring when one perceives even a tiny piece of the mystifyingly

by a joint universal scaling law in terms of just two parameters: the number 1⁄4, arising from the network constraints that control the dependence on mass, and 0.65 eV, originating in the chemical reaction dynamics of ATP production. This result can be restated in a slightly different

grained mass and temperature dependence was introduced as a compact summary of the scaling work in a paper titled “Toward a Metabolic Theory of Ecology” published in the journal Ecology in 2004 and coauthored by Jim Brown and three of our then postdocs— Van Savage, Jamie Gillooly, and Drew Allen—together with me.

at that time. This was Ingmar Bergman’s extraordinary film The Seventh Seal. It is of Shakespearean grandeur and depth. It tells the story of a medieval knight, Antonius Block,

metabolic rates decrease with the size of the organism following power law scaling with an exponent of 1⁄4. Cells in larger animals are systematically processing energy at a slower rate than cells in smaller ones. So at the critical cellular level cells suffer systematically less damage at a slower rate the larger the animal, and this results in a correspondingly longer life span. Recall that this down-regulation

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, had an

this vein, the hallmark of a successful city, regardless of size, is that it provides the physical ambience, culture, and landscape for facilitating and enhancing diverse social interactivity by its attractive cityscapes and gathering places, user-friendly and accessible transport and communication systems, and a supportive sense of community, commerce, culture, commitment, and leadership. Cities are effectively machines for stimulating and integrating the continuous positive feedback dynamics between the physical and the social, each multiplicatively enhancing the other. Indeed, as will be explained in the next chapter, it is this multiplicative mechanism that is ultimately responsible for the open-ended exponential growth that is characteristic of economies and cities, and to which we have become addicted,

standard model of the elementary particles. This incorporates, integrates, and explains a breathtaking

such an analysis for the entire U.S. urban system consisting of 360 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) for a suite of metrics.7 A sample of the results is presented in Figure 50), where the deviations from scaling for personal

these deviations Scale-Adjusted Metropolitan Indicators (SAMIs). The horizontal axis across the center of these graphs is the line along which the SAMI is zero and there is no deviation from what is predicted from the size of the city. As can be seen, every city

attachment, or cumulative advantage, is due to Herbert Simon and is consequently nowadays referred to as the Yule-Simon process. Simon, by the way, was an extraordinary polymath and one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. His research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, economics, management, philosophy of science, sociology, and political science. He was a founding father of several important scientific subdisciplines whose influence has gained great prominence in recent years, including artificial intelligence, information processing, decision

This extraordinary process, which can be thought of as the social metabolism of a city, is responsible for increasing our conventional biological metabolic rate derived from the food we eat from just 2,000 food calories a day or 100 watts to about 11,000 watts, the equivalent of 2 million

active business network (called the Applied Complexity Network) comprising diverse companies, some small and incipient, but many of them large and

So he did have a formula—and it had worked brilliantly. These days it’s hard to believe it was for real: no politics, no committees, no reports, no referees, no interviews, “just” focus on excellence and use extremely good judgment. Well, at least in principle, that’s what we were trying to do at SFI and, indeed, still are: find the best people, trust them, give them support,