Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West (PDF)

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This is science writing as wonder and as inspiration. —The Wall Street JournalWall Street JournalFrom 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.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “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 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.”

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Scale is defined as simply “how a system responds when its size changes.” The premise of this book is that scaling in all living systems leads to a “generic laws” that can be used to understand the “dynamics, growth, and organization of animals, plants, human social behavior, cities and companies.”I heard Geoffrey West at a conference in Krakow in 2016, in which he discussed many of the concepts from this book. In essence, he took through the audience through the contents of the 1st chapter (the overview) over the course a 90-minute lecture. It was engaging enough to convince me to buy the book when it came out the following year.West builds his theories around a concept of “living systems” which includes traditional organisms (from bacteria to large mammals) but also extends to include large cities and companies, defined as “quintessential complex adaptive systems operating over an enormous range of multiple spatial, temporal, energy, and mass scales.”It is weird to think of companies, economies and cities obeying the same set of laws that govern biology. The relevant analogies West proposes are 1) ant colonies which exhibit complex group behavior far in excess of what any individual ant can accomplish, and 2) the brain which achieves consciousness, intelligence, and personality from the coordinated firings of billions of lifeless neurons. These hive intelligences are called “emergent system phenomenon,” one of the hallmarks of so-called “complexity science”.One of the interesting hypotheses is that natural selection is not the “end all be all” of understanding biology. Natural selection is itself sharply limited by deeper, fundamental laws and restraints associated with scaling.I found these ideas fascinating, even if the material is a bit dry at times. West’s theories provoke and answer all sorts of interesting questions.ON NETWORKS:The mechanistic origin of scaling laws arises because all organisms are serviced by multiple networks (like the cardiovascular and respiratory systems) that share three universal properties: 1) They are completely space-filling, 2) They have invariant terminal units that do not scale (e.g. the cells in a mouse are the same size as cells in a whale), and 3) They minimize the amount of energy required to function.Key concepts include nonlinear scaling, scale invariance, emergent behavior, fractals, and logarithmic scales (I really wish I had paid more attention to logarithms in high school!)ON GROWTH:Metabolism scales predictably with size; the larger the animal, the lower the metabolic rate and the longer the life. “Lowering metabolism decreases [cellular] damage, slows the aging process, and increases maximum life span.”What limits the growth of biological animals, or why can’t Godzilla really exist? As an animal grows larger, weight increases exponentially faster than surface area, but the strength of the limbs, bones, etc. is determined by the size of the cross-functional surface areas. In practical terms, growth is constrained by how much weight the skeleton can bear. Also, since all mammals have similarly-sized capillaries that scale uniformly in relation to size, there is a point at which they would be too widely spaced to nourish more cells with oxygen.There is a lower limit as well. West demonstrates that mammals smaller than an Etruscan shrew could not evolve. Their aortas would not be large enough to support pulsatile AC blood flow. (He does not attempt to explain how shrews evolved from smaller non-mammals in the first place.)Why do elephants need large ears? An elephant’s volume is much larger than its surface area, making it difficult to dissipate all the internal heat it generates. The ears provide a significant amount of “extra” surface area through which heat can escape.Population and economics represent open-ended growth curves. For example, at the time of Jesus, the population of earth was only 250 million. Today, there are more people alive than have existed in all of human history combined up to this point. This is a basic principle of logarithmic math and it underscores the ever-quickening pace of innovation that will be necessary to support open-ended population and economic growth.ON ENERGY :Our “effective metabolism rate” is a measurement of energy required to live our modern lives: “You are extraordinarily efficient in your use of energy relative to anything that is man-made. Your dishwasher, for example, requires more than ten times more energy per second than you do to wash dishes, while your car uses it at a rate in excess of a thousand times more just to move you around. When you add up all the energy an average human being on the planet uses to fuel all of the machinery, artifacts, and infrastructure integral to modern life it comes to about thirty times the rate of our natural energy requirements.”Exponential economic and population growth cannot continue forever. Innovation cycles have “kept up” so far in human history, but these cycles will have to keep growing shorter each generation. West does not advocate a traditional Malthusian view that catastrophe will inevitably result due to overpopulation or environmental disaster. He does suggest socioeconomic growth may eventually be limited by an energy curve, just as biological growth is limited.ON CITIES:”The overwhelming majority of human beings will be urban dwellers by the second half of this century.” We need a science of cities to quantitatively understand their “dynamics, growth, and evolution.”Cities are composed of two types of networks–physical infrastructure and social networks.Cities provide sublinear scaling for infrastructure–gas stations, electrical lines, roads, gas lines. This is a global pattern that results in less energy consumption per person. It is directly in line with the benefits of metabolic scaling in mammals in relation to size. “The bigger the city, the greener it is and the smaller its per capita carbon footprint.”Cities provide super-linear scaling for wages, patents, gross domestic product, crime, and disease (i.e., higher output of both the “good and the bad” per person). There is predictable patterning within countries but not between countries.Because of scaling, cities are also the engines of optimizations that have made innovation possible. “It is all too often forgotten that the whole point of a city is to bring people together, to facilitate interaction, and thereby to create ideas and wealth, to enhance innovative thinking and encourage entrepreneurship and cultural activity by taking advantage of the extraordinary opportunities that the diversity of a great city offers. This is the magic formula that we discovered ten thousand years ago when we inadvertently began the process of urbanization.”ON SOCIAL NETWORKS:The average person has a “tribe” of 150 individuals he interacts with regularly. Individuals may come and go within the tribe, but the size of the network remains static. This size directly correlates to the volume of the neocortex in our brains, which is in turn correlated to our metabolism rate that limits scaling factors in biological processes. Causation is hard to prove, but West surmises if our brains were bigger, we could manage more friendships with a higher number of people.In some ways, social networks scale inversely to physical networks such as the cardiovascular system in your body or the electrical distribution grid in your city. This is ultimately why biological organisms experience bounded growth and a finite life span, but we have not yet discovered the limits of urbanization or the age at which cities die.ON COMPANIES:There is some evidence of scaling laws at work in companies, but the theory is not as well developed. There is higher variance in the data. West’s explanation is that “evolutionary forces” have not had enough time to optimize the ecosystem since the Industrial Revolution. This does not ring true, especially since (as he points out) the new Chinese stock market optimized similar to the US market in only fifteen years.Overspecialization and lack of diversification appears to play a role in the death of most companies. Yet, the few companies that have survived over 200 years are uniformly small, highly specialized organizations that have created generational brand recognition and loyalty.In conclusion, I highly recommend this book. I did not always understand or agree with Dr. West’s interpretation of all the data, but his application of physics and biology principles to cities and companies raises many interesting ideas, questions and possibilities.

⭐Geoffrey West’s book Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, And Companies (Penguin Press (New York), 2017, is a wide-ranging survey about the way in which scale and scalability affects every life form and activity, including civilization and its human institutions here on earth. This is a profoundly important book, in that it brings together fundamental knowledge and understandings of the biological sciences, biochemistry, and physiology in ways that show that there appear to be what might be called the ‘Laws of Life’ might be hypothesized and generalized as traits and characteristics that all life forms share in common regarding commonalities and replications of patterns, their respective strengths, stabilities, and lengths of time that they may be expected to remain alive and retain viability.These matters have occupied the thoughts and explorations of philosophers since the days of ancient Greece when schools of philosophical thought first became systematized and written down. In many respects, the Platonic model, consisting of idealized prototypes to which they are real-world exemplars emulated poorly, was a step or two along the right path, but not in the way that anyone would readily recognize, because Platonic thinkers utilize the mathematics of geometry to express their ideas. It would take humankind an additional 2500 years in order to arrive at understandings about the ultimate nature of reality, not in terms of circles, squares, and triangles, as believed by the ancient Greeks; but rather as stochastic processes that are now believed to govern the known universe itself. It is not the Platonic ideals as to form whose characteristics are now being studied; instead, it is the operation of evolution itself, achieved through random processes that apply to all living things, and that the atoms, molecules, and organic tissues themselves that are developed over time within a myriad of species share common characteristics as to their strengths, their replicabilities, and their scalabilities that allow them to remain viable, and to reproduce their respective species. This concept of scalability as a limiting factor West shows as apply across the board, from the simplest unicellular life forms to the largest animals capable of independent locomotion and survival here on earth.Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist who has taught at major universities around the world, among them Oxford University, Imperial College, London, and elsewhere in the world. He is also a Distinguished Professor and former president of the Santa Fe Institute.He has also conducted pioneering research into the nature of complex systems, and what might be expected to occur when those systems reach beyond the cycles of natural growth that they would otherwise have without the intervention of innovative technologies that allow those systems to expand beyond their natural limitations. His treatise is a tour de force about how these earthly life forms develop and expand from there simplest roots to the complexities that we face every day. More importantly, scaling itself allows him to explore the nature of complexity; the concept of emergence, self-organization, biological networks, and resilience. He addresses matters of ecological and environmental sustainability; innovation and what he refers to as ‘Cycles of Singularities’.West talks about the institutions of human life, from the simple to the most complex; how cities and urbanization closely resemble diverse colonies of protozoa; the nature of exponentiality and so-called ‘power laws’, and why that is important, as increasing size is also a hallmark of inherent weakness in individuals, in species, and in human-made societies, economies, and institutions. He speaks about the emerging science of cities and city life, what makes them good, interesting, and viable; but he also speaks to how cities can drown in their own complexities.He also talks about something called fractal geometry, and how the complex patterns on which fractal mathematics is based is widely applicable to a wide range of subject matter, from computer graphic interfaces and motion pictures, to explaining cardiac arrhythmia, to music and artwork, to simulations of weather and earthquakes, and to explain volatility in the stock market. The important thing to remember about scale is that it magnifies both what is known, and what is unknown; and it is in that realm that magnification multiplies disruptive effects. In seismology, we all know about the Richter Scale, in which the effects of earthquakes are magnified exponentially with each incremental increase of force on the scale magnified by a power of 10. The higher the number, the much more powerful they become, causing their disruptive effects to propagate over a much wider area. The Richter scale is illustrative of what is known as a power law, meaning that on a logarithmic scale, the strength of the effect increases according to the size of the exponent that acts as a multiplier of lower numbered effects. At the same time, those exponentially larger effects are less commonly seen, and by virtue of their absence from consciousness, people lose awareness of the potential for incalculable damage once those effects become manifest. Along with heightened impact come interactions with other aspects of the environment that might not be noticeable. For example, the great Alaskan earthquake of 1964 exceeded 9 points on the Richter scale, but it was the tsunami that followed that wiped out coastal towns and villages. So, scale matters, even if one of the more significant dangers is our collective forgetfulness that these events occur; and they do occur more frequently than we would like to imagine.West concludes by considering about an emerging science of commercial entities, i.e., companies: their various complexities and more limited abilities to remain sustainable over time.As an interconnected body of knowledge in which groundwork findings in biology are shown to have relevance to larger matters about the way society operates, West’s book is essentially a work in progress. Social science, including economics, psychology, and politics (including law) are still far behind their physical science brethren in making the proper connections, and in arriving at the appropriate conclusions. Nevertheless, the fundamental understandings are there for study and contemplation. Sometimes, it is more than enough that a pioneering researcher or philosopher simply points the way forward for others to follow. That is perhaps the ultimate value of Geoffrey West’s magnificent book: acute observations provoke serious inquiry lead to further observations and explanatory hypotheses.Science is always a work in progress; and what we claim to know today can become subsumed in a larger body of knowledge that is now accumulating. West acknowledges that there are natural limits to what living metabolism can do to keep an organism alive, even if that organism is the beneficiary of natural selection. He invokes the Second Law of Thermodynamics to suggest that entropy places an upper limit on the amount of energy in living things that can be turned to productive use. When a process reaches equilibrium in a closed system, the process itself may cease to continue; and whether it is described as an accumulation of disorder, or tagged with a pejorative appellation such as ‘useless energy’, the idea encompasses a physiochemical process beyond which its constituent parts cannot process further. The concept of wisdom implicitly acknowledges that lives are finite, that at some point things come to an end, and in the end, the preferred course of action is to make the best use of the time and resources we have available to us. To that end, an ungovernable sense of unrestrained scalability may cause us to throw away whatever potential for good or betterment that we can reasonably expect to have left to us over our remaining lifespans. In this respect, Geoffrey West may be considered something of a stoical philosopher. And that is yet another excellent reason to acquire and read his book. Highly recommended!

⭐I found this book very thought provoking. Especially the parts where he discussed the city and social connections. Also the parts of exponential population growth and what might follow were interesting. There were some repetition in the book, it could have been more edited, but on the other hand the book had a quality that you can’t stop reading it which is allways fun when you read a lot. He is very fluent writer and I think anyone can find joy reading this book. It was between entertaining and scientific.

⭐There’s too many non-positive reviews of this book! It’s a great read and hat’s off to the author. He doesn’t quite clinch the point he is trying to make (so perhaps I should drop a star) but that really is besides the point, not least because he’s tackling complexity so it’s hard to be definitive. This book will make you think and that’s the most important thing for me.

⭐This is a most interesting book. I did not give it 5 stars because it is a bit wordy in places. However, it gives much thought provoking info. If you like factual books then a great book for the summer holiday.

⭐The way biology scales and an insight to the birth and death of companies were fascinating. But much of the book was not rigorous enough for me. Perhaps it is because what he is trying to analyse is still a young science. I felt the author knew more about our near future than he is letting on because he wanted to maintain an upbeat tempo.

⭐A very stimulating book that raises many fascinating issues and shows ways in which they may yet be resolved. The ‘physics of cities’ is a spectacular prospect!

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