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#819 Geoffrey West - Scale; Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies

The Dissenter

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The Mouse to Elephant Curve

The mouse to elephant curve is a simple power law whose exponent is three quarters. Cliber discovered that the slope of this line was three-quarters, very close to the number 0.75. Every time you double the size of an animal, there's a sub-25% savings with each doubling. So we are much more efficient than our dog or cat, but our horse, or elephant, is more efficient than us. And by the way, what I should have added is that many people following cliber started looking at how various things scale in the same way.

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