Scale

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

By: Geoffrey West

Narrated by: Bruce Mann

Length: 19 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

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, including how much food it eats per day, what its heart rate is, how long it will take to mature, its life span, 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 percent more efficient - and lives 2 percent 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.

©2017 Geoffrey West (P)2017 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"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)

That poor elephant doesn't live in a linear world

We live in a complex world. As the author says in the book, the bible is based on 'opinions, intuition, and prejudices'; and is up to us to determine if 'life has meaning or is without purpose'. For us to bring order out of the chaos we need a narrative to hold the story together. The author tries to tie together all the items that are in the subtitle of the book into a coherent universal truth about the world by seeing the world as a recursive holistic entity tied together by a scaling parameter expressed through emergent properties. The author speaks trenchantly on each of the topics and ties each of the topics together with his universal way of seeing the world with his system wide approach for understanding.

We live in a non-linear world but we always intuitively think linearly (oh I felt for that poor elephant who was given a too large of dose of LSD). When we naively scale we default simplistically by using a linear interpolation. Most of the world is not best modeled linearly (this is why we have statisticians). The author takes our false default position and refines it by adjusting for the dimensionality between area (2 dimensions) and volume (3 dimensions) and adding a dimension for the fractal (recursive) nature inherent within all systems and making the power function such that every doubling means a corresponding increase of 168% (i.e. 2 to the 3/4 power). The core of the author's theory lies within that power function or variations of it.

He never really talks down to his readers and moves the story fairly fast. He speaks statistics fluently but doesn't use a single equation within the book to intimidate math phobic readers. When there is randomness in the creation of a system there will always be an exponential distribution. Just think of a young boy sitting on a dock fishing. The number of fish the boy catches in a very short time will never be more than one. The time between catching the fish will always be an 'exponential distribution' (and the number of fish the boy catches will follow a Poisson Distribution, poisson is fish in French). All I needed to establish that those very special distributions was independence and identically distributed events at a subsystem level (and a few other non specified and minor regulatory conditions). The author takes this fact about the real world and uses it to create the self similarity inherent within subsystems across a network. The author gives an example about aging that illustrates the magical properties inherent within this special distribution and why it is so special and is worth knowing about. (My favorite fiction book, 'Gravity's Rainbow' does that too and I highly recommend that book).

The author is a polymath. He drops a lot of philosophers names and usually that annoys me, because most writers who do that don't seem to know anything beyond the name that they dropped. This author seemed to understand the connections. Aristotle (who he mentions, but mostly for his politics not his metaphysics) would see the world in terms of 'whatness' or 'thatness', the universal verse the particular, or like Spinoza (who the author mentions multiple times) the quantitative verse the qualitative. The author wants to take the intuition (the narrative, the story we tell to understand our place in the universe) and replace it with analytic truths. He'll say at the end of the book, that 'more data is better, but less data is best' because a theory that connects is most powerful of all. He brings up Kepler's laws based on Tycho Brahe's data sets by explaining what is being observed and contrasting that with Newton's Laws which tell how things necessarily are based on a priori truth.

The author wants to establish a universal holistic systems understanding of the world through analytical truths. (I would recommend the movie available on Youtube, 'Mindwalk' for anyone who is interested in these kind of things. The movie is based on a Fritjof Capra book but not his famous book 'Tao of Physics' and Liv Ullmann and Mont St. Michael are always beautiful to behold). Within the author's theory there was a unfolding of the necessity of evolutionary theory similar to Alfred Whitehead's as expressed in the delightful lecture 'The Function of Reason', and parts of Nietzsche's 'eternal recurrence of the identical will to power', a way of seeing the world such that everything that is is that way because it has to be. The self similarity inherent within all systems as expressed by the author would fit within a Nietzscheian frame work of the world, but the author doesn't connect those dots.

The author is bothered by the 'finite time singularity' that he thinks we're coming to. His thoughts on economic growth overlap with Robert Gordon's book 'The Rise and Fall of American Growth'. They both seem to lean towards that spectacular innovation is behind us. That's just their opinion and I respect that even though my opinion lies differently (I'm more optimistic, maybe foolishly, but that's just my opinion). Both books, had a bigger problem for me. Both covered too many topics all of which I'm very interested in and consequently have read many books on the topics and the books seldom told me things that I was not already aware of. Authors should always assume that readers are interested in the topic and tell us things we don't already know from recently published books.

Incredibly satisfying.

This book will change the way you see the world around you and help make sense of so many emerging phenomenon. A real gem.

very general

very general information and long to amount of knowledge presented, didn't meet my expectations of content.

A tour de force of intellect and creativity

West and his colleagues have seen relationships and discovered patterns in areas I never would have imagined. How do living things, cities, businesses and the environment change over time with surprisingly regular patterns? How do these patterns compare to one another across different entities?

Serious research has been done on these questions and it is explained with clarity. I like West's habit of stating a principle and then giving a couple of easy-to-understand examples. These are topics I knew nothing about and many of the discoveries are eye-openers.

A few reviewers complained about the charts in the print version. I listened to the audiobook and they were explained well.If you know what a logarithmic scale is there's no problem. I found the English narrator's diction a bit difficult at first, not a plain as a BBC newsreader's, but I got used to it.

The author does not pound on it but his views about the future are bleak unless our species achieves radical change. This may be the best possible time to be old.

Best book of 2018

The year isn’t over but Geoff West’ audiobook has greatly enhanced my ability to understand and think about the world and sustainability issues at many levels. It may take some time to find another such book.

Wow

terrifically exciting and fun, lives up to its full title. highly recommended to anyone no matter the field you may focus.

Loved It!

I loved hearing that there may be a connection between natural processes and business processes. It's very thought-provoking idea especially for myself in the green industry.

Diverse, Mathematical, Highly Relevant

Embrace the interconnectivity of biology, economics and social structure in this extremely well researched tome. Geoffrey West sets out to deliver a book that could explain in depth theories of scale to any local bartender and in my opinion, succeeds. Great read, important information and eye opening interconnectivity proven through laws of scale, loved every minute of the listen.

A new thought

I have thought of these concepts before. Thank you for giving them a vocabulary. I hope to others will be able to note the incredible level of connectivity.

Best book about cities since Jane Jacobs

What made the experience of listening to Scale the most enjoyable?

I could listen to Geoffrey West's insights all day long, again and again.

What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?

The nature of exponential growth

Which scene was your favorite?

The description of bacteria in a petri dish doubling in size every minute, and comparing this to the exponential growth of mega-cities throughout the world

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Scale, a documentary about what we have done and where we might be going

Any additional comments?

Scale is the most comprehensive scientific study of the complexity of cities, examining their importance in terms of economic growth and innovation. Cities are poorly understood and as a result we continue to create policies that work against our own long-term sustainability. Most books on the subject of cities are filled with openion about costs and economics. Most books about cities a written with an agenda. Scale approaches the city from the scientific method, revealing entirely new insights into the underlying structure of cities, nature, and companies. So much of what we believe in these subjects has no foundation in fact. The more people, who work in the construction of cities, architects, planners, elected officials, developers and citizens, understand the fundamental nature of how cities work, the better we might be able to shape plans and policies for the long-term benefit of our economy, security and well-being. I believe everyone on the planet should read this book.