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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 Effect of Genes on Growth

When you are young, you eat, and you get bigger. But somehow when you begin to get to 15, 16, 17, 18, you keep eating. In fact, you eat more, but you grow less. So the reason that you stop growing is because the supply, your metabolism, the supply of energy, as you get bigger, is you're growing less than linearly. The bigger you are, the less energy is being supplied. From this, you can derive the equation, governing growth. And then from that, you can drive the growth curve for any organism. It has universal predictions for growth; it tells you how big things grow and how quickly they grow.

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