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!
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The unexpected order of everything.
In three words, excellent, necessary, and inspiring.Scale is about order where we see just chaos. It should be read together with Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life. You should try this one first.By the way, Geoffrey West has a Ted conference on the topic that I saw, in fact, before reading the book. But, as is customary, the book is superior, even necessary because it expands in every direction the topics he touches at the conference room. I would say that the conference is more focus in the theme of cities as organisms. The book is the path you have to follow before arriving there. And the journey (the book is a fascinating one) is full of little details and several perspectives that are being added one by one up to the final chapter, where you see the whole picture.But before getting there, the book has to answer several questions. The main one is enunciated at the very beginning (page 7): "How do we ensure that our human-engineered systems evolved only over the past ten thousand years, can continue to coexist with the natural biological world, which evolved over billions of years?" And even more important: "Can we maintain a vibrant, innovative society driven by ideas and wealth creation, or are we destined to become a planet of slums, conflict, and devastation?"Full of examples and ideas, the work makes you look for yourself, to review some videos, articles, papers, and, as always, some other books. In fact, inspired by Scale I bought also The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. A classic.This is a Santa Fe Institute hot topic so this is more than mere academia, is surfing on top of wave. The book was published this year and my hunch is that it will continue to be present for several more. The search for "universal laws of growth, innovation, sustainability, and the pace of life in organisms, cities, and companies," is just beginning. The math is the same as usual but today we have computer simulation, and we can do experiments in a scale never imagined before.If you are interested in how the world works in a big scale, this is the book. Every week or so a million people leave the countryside to the city. Yes, every week. Can you imagine? All those huge nodes, connected to each other are configuring a net so vast and thick, that we need something more than just keeping accounts. Here enters scale, showing that size matters, and every single species occupies a unique niche according its scale --including us, of course. So, if the scale, which means the position of an organism or a super-organism (as cities) with respect, for instance, to the consumption of energy, represents an order, well, we are facing the possibility of finding a law or laws that tell us how this works, what we can expect for the future, what we should see when reviewing the past, an so on. The point is "that the dynamics, growth, and organization of animal, plants, human social behavior, cities, and companies are, in fact, subject to similar generic laws." That is why the book is so impressive and that's why you need time to digest all this information page by page.It takes a week to read it, but after that it will always be with you. You won't forget it because it changes the way you see the city, your city. And in so doing is leaving behind all those crazy ideas that try to explain through rhetorical means why the cities are so big and why they fail (like Santiago de Chile, during the last winter when it ran out of electricity).Well, a deserved and permanent five stars book.
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