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

by Geoffrey West

Overview

"This is science writing as wonder and as inspiration." —The Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal

From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in.

Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term “complexity” can be misleading, however, because what makes West’s discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses.

Fascinated by aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science: West found that despite the riotous diversity in mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal’s circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient—and lives 25% longer. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism’s body.

West’s work has been game-changing for biologists, but then he made the even bolder move of exploring his work’s applicability. Cities, too, are constellations of networks and laws of scalability relate with eerie precision to them. Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The implications of these discoveries are far-reaching, and are just beginning to be explored. Scale is a thrilling scientific adventure story about the elemental natural laws that bind us together in simple but profound ways. Through the brilliant mind of Geoffrey West, we can envision how cities, companies and biological life alike are dancing to the same simple, powerful tune.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594205583
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics and biology. West is a Senior Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a distinguished professor at the Sante Fe Institute, where he served as the president from 2005-2009. In 2006 he was named to Time’s list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.”

Table of Contents

1 The Big Picture 1

Introduction, Overview, and Summary

We Live in an Exponentially Expanding Socioeconomic Urbanized World

A Matter of Life and Death

Energy, Metabolism, and Entropy

Size Really Matters: Scaling and Nonlinear Behavior

Scaling and Complexity: Emergence, Self-Organization, and Resilience

You Are Your Networks: Growth from Cells to Whales

Cities and Global Sustainability: Innovation and Cycles of Singularities

Companies and Businesses

2 The Measure of All Things: An Introduction to Scaling 35

From Godzilla to Galileo

Misleading Conclusions and Misconceptions of Scale: Superman

Orders of Magnitude, Logarithms, Earthquakes, and the Richter Scale

Pumping Iron and Testing Galileo

Individual Performance and Deviations from Scaling: The Strongest Man in the World

More Misleading Conclusions and Misconceptions of Scale: Drug Dosages from LSD and Elephants to Tylenol and Babies

BMI, Quetelet, the Average Man, and Social Physics

Innovation and Limits to Growth

The Great Eastern, Wide-Gauge Railways, and the Remarkable Isambard Kingdom Brunei

William Froude and the Origins of Modeling Theory

Similarity and Similitude: Dimensionless and Scale-Invariant Numbers

3 The Simplicity, Unity, and Complexity of Life 79

From Quarks and Strings to Cells and Whales

Metabolic Rate and Natural Selection

Simplicity Underlying Complexity: Kleiber's Law, Self-Similarity, and Economies of Scale

Universality and the Magic Number Four That Controls Life

Energy, Emergent Laws, and the Hierarchy of Life

Networks and the Origins of Quarter-Power Allometric Scaling

Physics Meets Biology: On the Nature of Theories, Models, and Explanations

Network Principles and the Origins of Allometric Scaling

Metabolic Rate and Circulatory Systems in Mammals, Plants, and Trees

Digression on Nikola Tesla, Impedance Matching, and AC/DC

Back to Metabolic Rate, Beating Hearts, and Circulatory Systems

Self-Similarity and the Origin of the Magic Number Four

Fractals: The Mysterious Case of the Lengthening Borders

4 The Fourth Dimension of Life: Growth, Aging, and Death 147

The Fourth Dimension of Life

Why Aren't There Mammals the Size of Tiny Ants?

And Why Aren't There Enormous Mammals the Size of Godzilla?

Growth

Global Warming, the Exponential Scaling of Temperature, and the Metabolic Theory of Ecology

Aging and Mortality

5 From the Anthropocene to the Urbanocene: A Planet Dominated by Cities 209

Living in Exponentially Expanding Universes

Cities, Urbanization, and Global Sustainability

Digression: What Exactly Is an Exponential Anyway? Some Cautionary Fables

The Rise of the Industrial City and Its Discontents

Malthas, Neo-Malthusians, and the Great Innovation Optimists

It's All Energy, Stupid

6 Prelude to a Science of Cities 247

Arc Cities and Companies Just Very Large Organisms?

St. Jane and the Dragons

An Aside: A Personal Experience of Garden Cities and New Town

Intermediate Summary and Conclusion

7 Toward A Science of Cities 269

The Scaling of Cities

Cities and Social Networks

What Are These Networks?

Cities: Christalls or Fractals?

Cities as the Great Social Incubator

How Many Close Friends Do You Really Have? Dunbar and His Numbers

Words and Cities

The Fractal City: Integrating the Social with the Physical

8 Consequences and Predictions: From Mobility and the Pace of Life to Social Connectivity, Diversity, Metabolism, and Growth 325

The Increasing Pace of Life

Life on an Accelerating Treadmill: The City as the Incredible Shrinking Time Machine

Commuting Time and the Size of Cities

The Increasing Pace of Walking

You Are Not Alone: Mobile Telephones as Detectors of Human Behavior

Testing and Verifying the Theory: Social Connectivity in Cities

The Remarkably Regular Structure of Movement in Cities

Overperformers and Underperformers

The Structure of Wealth, Innovation, Crime, and Resilience: The Individuality and Ranking of Cities

Prelude to Sustainability: A Short Digression on Water

The Socioeconomic Diversity of Business Activity in Cities

Growth and the Metabolism of Cities

9 Toward a Science of Companies 379

Is Walmart a Scaled-Up Big Joe's Lumber and Google a Great Big Bear?

The Myth of Open-Ended Growth

The Surprising Simplicity of Company Mortality

Requiescant in Pace

Why Companies Die, but Cities Don't

10 The Vision of a Grand Unified Theory of Sustainability 411

Accelerating Treadmills, Cycles of Innovation, and Finite Time Singularities

Afterword 427

Science for the Twenty-first Century

Transdisciplinarity, Complex Systems, and the Santa Fe Institute

Big Data: Paradigm 4.0 or Just 3.1?

Postscript and Acknowledgments 449

Notes 457

Index 465

List of Illustrations 481

Editorial Reviews

03/13/2017
West, a theoretical physicist and former president of the Santa Fe Institute, argues in this dense yet accessible work that there are simple laws that underlie all complex systems, whether organic entities or human constructs. Animals, plants, economies, cultures, cities, and companies are united by the fact that they come into existence, grow, mature, and decline. West’s central conceit in studying these phenomena is scaling: how a system changes when its size changes. He finds that the answer is not obvious, but it can be expressed mathematically. For example, doubling an animal’s size increases its energy requirements by only 75%, which remains true whether one looks at a mouse or a whale. The structures of civilization scale similarly, West shows, as he analyzes cities and corporations within this framework. He supports his evidence with a plethora of striking charts and graphs that are notable for their simplicity. Reducing biological and cultural systems to quantifiable data streams has become fashionable, if rightly contentious, but West turns up many fascinating paradoxes in this large, stimulating, and mostly lucid book of Big Ideas. (May)

Publishers Weekly

An enchanting intellectual odyssey…also a satisfying personal and professional memoir of a distinguished scientist whose life’s work came to be preoccupied with finding ways to break down traditional boundaries between disciplines to solve the long-term global challenges of sustainability…. Mr. West manages to deliver a lot of theory and history accessibly and entertainingly… Provocative and fascinating.”—The New York Times

“Scale, a grand synthesis of topics [Geoffrey West] has studied for several decades, makes an important and eloquent case for the significance [of universal laws of size and growth] in an ecology of the natural and human world — and in understanding whether the two can fit together.” —Nature

“West’s insightful analysis and astute observations patiently build an intellectual framework that is ultimately highly rewarding, offering a new perspective on the many scales with which nature and society challenge us…A fascinating journey.” – Science Magazine

"This is the sort of big-ideas book that comes along only every few years, the kind that changes the conversation in boardroom, common room and dining room....A book full of thrilling ideas." —The Sunday Times (London)

“From a dean of complexity theory comes a sharp consideration of the pace and pattern of life in a universe of "complex adaptive systems” …West's book is a succession of charts, graphs, and aha moments, all deeply learned but lightly worn. By the end of the book, readers will understand such oddments as why it is that the hearts of all animals, from mouse to elephant, beat roughly the same number of times across a lifespan and why the pace of life increases so markedly as the population grows (which explains why people walk faster, it turns out, in big cities than out in the countryside) …Illuminating and entertaining—heady science written for a lay readership, bringing scaling theory and kindred ideas to a large audience.”—Kirkus Reviews 

"I can think of no more exciting thinker in the world today than Geoffrey West. By bringing a physicist's razor-sharp mind to wonderfully surprising questions — 'Why Aren’t There Mammals the Size of Tiny Ants?' or 'Are Cities and Companies Just Very Large Organisms?' — West forces us to see everything anew, from our own bodies to the mega-cities our species increasingly chooses to inhabit. Scale is a firework display of popular science." 
—Niall Ferguson, senior fellow, the Hoover Institution

“This spectacular book on how logarithmic scaling governs everything is packed with news—from the self-similar dynamics of cells and ecosystems to exactly why companies always die and cities don’t. I dog-eared and marked up damn near every page.”
—Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog
 
“Geoffrey West's Scale is filled with brilliant insights. He illuminates the laws of nature underlying everything from tiny organisms and humans to cities and companies, and provides a quantitative framework for decoding the deep complexity of our interconnected world. If you want to know why companies fail, how cities persist and what is needed to sustain our civilization in this era of rapid innovation, read this amazing book.”
—Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce
 
“When Geoffrey West, a brilliant theoretical physicist, turned his lens to the study of life spans, biological systems or cities he stumbled onto a game-changing universal insight about growth and sustainability. Scale is dazzling and provocative and West proves himself to be a compelling and entertaining writer—this is a book we will be talking about for a long time.”
—Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone
 
“If there were a Nobel Prize for transdisciplinary science Geoffrey West would have won it for the work covered in Scale. This is a book of great originality and deep importance, containing startling insights about topics as seemingly unrelated as aging and death, sleep, metabolism, cities, energy use, creativity, corporations, and even the sustainability of our existence.  If you are curious about how the world really works, you must read this book.”
—Bill Miller, Chairman, Emeritus, Sante Fe Institute
 
“Geoffrey West’s Scale is a revelation. Based on his path breaking theory and research on super-linear scaling, it provides powerful new insights into the basic scientific laws that power our modern society and economy, its startup companies, large corporations and cities.  The book is a must read for CEOs, technologists, mayors, urban leaders and anyone who wants to understand the simple laws that shape the complex, self-organizing world in which we live.”
—Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class

“This is an important and original book, of immense scope. Geoffrey West is a polymath, whose insights range over physics, biology and the social sciences. He shows that the sizes, shapes and lifetimes of living things - despite their amazing diversity — display surprising correlations and patterns, and that these follow from basic physical principles. He then discovers, more surprisingly, the emergence of similar 'scaling laws' in human societies - in our cities, companies and social networks. These findings are presented in clear non-technical prose, enlivened by anecdotes which convey how these concepts arose, and thoughtful assessment of why they're important for those planning our future. This fascinating book deserves very wide readership.” 
—Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and author of Just Six Numbers

“Each human should learn to read and write, to count, and for those who know how to count, scalability. Scaling is the most important yet most hidden and rarely discussed attribute—without understanding it one cannot possibly understand the world. This book will expand your thinking from three dimensions to four. Get two copies, just in case you lose one.” 
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the Incerto

“An absolutely riveting read. Like the best detective story, West lays out the amazing challenge of understanding why animals, cities and companies all scale so uniformly and then skillfully lets us into the secrets that his detective work has uncovered. This book captures the spirit of science in the 21st century, revealing the deep connections not just across physics and biology but society and life. The book is a perfect balance between the big scientific story and West’s own personal narrative. We accompany the author on his quest to face up to his own mortality while at the same time being exposed to the theoretical discoveries that West has pioneered in his groundbreaking work.” 
—Marcus du Sautoy, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and author of The Great Unknown
 
“It’s rare in the history of science that someone has a big, bold, beautiful, stunningly simple new idea that also turns out to be right. Geoffrey West had one. And Scale is its story.”
—Steven Strogatz, Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University and  author of The Joy of X

From the Publisher

05/01/2017
Creatures and companies have life spans but eventually die; why don't cities? West (physics, Santa Fe Inst., NM; Scaling in Biology) examines scaling laws, or mathematical formulas for how things change with size, to answer such questions. Most intricate systems, both living and nonliving, in which many individual parts act together, do not scale linearly. That is, when the size of such a system increases, one begins to see economies of scale where bigger is relatively more efficient and where productivity is enhanced with size. West demonstrates that organisms become more efficient the bigger they are, but owing to an imbalance between energy needed for growth and maintenance or repair, they eventually perish. Cities, on the other hand, use proportionately fewer resources: their physical infrastructure grows but their social capital (their "energy" produced) actually increases relative to size, leading to an ability to keep growing indefinitely. This title explores why corporations seem to function more like biological beings than like cities. Ultimately, West calls for developing a comprehensive theory that addresses questions of sustainability and allows us to plan for a future in a multifaceted world. VERDICT This dense, yet compelling work applies mathematical rigor to real-world problems; likely to be of interest to urban planners and entrepreneurs.—Wade M. Lee, Univ. of Toledo Lib.

Library Journal

2017-04-02
From a dean of complexity theory comes a sharp consideration of the pace and pattern of life in a universe of "complex adaptive systems."Everything is connected to everything else: thus the great insight of modern ecology. But more, writes theoretical physicist West (Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Santa Fe Institute), there is a "pervasive interconnectedness and interdependency of energy, resources, and environmental, ecological, economic, social, and political systems," and this interconnection gives us something of a grand unified theory of everything. West's book is a succession of charts, graphs, and aha moments, all deeply learned but lightly worn. By the end of the book, readers will understand such oddments as why it is that the hearts of all animals, from mouse to elephant, beat roughly the same number of times across a lifespan and why the pace of life increases so markedly as the population grows (which explains why people walk faster, it turns out, in big cities than out in the countryside). Some of the concepts West explores are much-used elsewhere but rarely so clearly explained—e.g., how does a self-organizing system self-organize, and what emerges in the case of emergence? Of overarching concern, of course, is scale: the behavior of sequences of things and events in arithmetic and logarithmic numerical relationships, whether atomic bombs or earthquakes or safe dosages of LSD and metabolic rates. These natural phenomena also have applications in social and economic systems, as West discusses in such matters as the growth of cities and the decline and collapse of companies, which are punished in time for their natural tendency to be "short-sighted, conservative, and not very supportive of innovative or risky ideas." How risky West's ideas are is a matter of interpretation, but there's plenty of news in such things as his conception of the "finite time singularity" that is unfolding all around us. Illuminating and entertaining—heady science written for a lay readership, bringing scaling theory and kindred ideas to a large audience.

Kirkus Reviews