Geoffrey West (4) (1940–)

A very ambitious study. Could have done with a little more editing.

Are there universal laws of scaling chemistry, biology? Yes.

Do the same universal laws apply to the structures of urbanization and commerce? The jury’s still out on this one.

How important is it to figure out how to reign in the exponential growth our species?

I’d say pretty darned important.

Will technical innovation do it for us? Not bloody likely.

Will we negotiate the political and economic compromises needed with other countries to make this happen? Also, not so likely.… (altro)

Another big book with a lot of content. I guess it can be summarised as an attempt to relate a whole lot of real word phenomena on logarithmic scales. Some of this is fairly "old hat" like the number of heartbeats of animals related to their total body mass. (At least I seem to recall seeing this long ago). And, yes, kit is fascinating to see that no matter the mass of the animal they basically have about two billion heart beats (whether a hamster or a whale).....it's just that the whale lives a lot longer than the hamster if you are using a regular clock and not the pulse to record the time.
I remember trying to improve my scientific results by using log transformations but was always disappointed with the results. The author comes to this field from a background of cosmology so is used to having huge differences in scale and looking for similarities via log transformations. however if you are basically working with monkeys then the deviations between species might be significant and you probably don't need log transformations to see that. In fact, the log transformations just mask the real differences. I guess, that's my main concern about the thrust of this whole book. Sure the big picture is fascinating and can give some insights but log transformations can also mask significant real differences.
For example his Figures 15-18 show the growth curves for various animals (mass vs time) and his smooth curves miss an important feature of such growth curves (it applies also to plants) and that is that immediately after birth there is a "lag phase" where typically the newborn declines in weight....presumably partly shock and partly re-adjusting to the new environment and new feeding systems. I also found myself wondering about his curves showing the accelerating pace of major paradigm shifts. Is it legitimate to include a biological process such as the emergence of eukaryotic cells with the gap between the telephone and the computer. Surely there is a large element of "cherry picking" here where he has chosen events to suit his scale. It looks like nothing of significance happened between the emergence of life and the emergence of the Eukaryotes. In fact, there were huge changes; thermatogales, cyanobacteria, gram positive bacteria, the whole Archaea...including methane-bacteria, and halophiles,… (altro)