Scaling Theory
#2 – Geoffrey West: The Scaling Laws Behind Living Organisms, Cities, Businesses, and Technologies
Mar 25, 2024
Physicist Geoffrey West discusses scaling laws in living organisms, cities, businesses, and technologies. Topics include power laws in mammal heartbeats, patents and crime in cities, technology scaling, and innovation. The conversation also dives into super-linearity in cities and companies, historical impacts on tech giants, and the need for interdisciplinary collaboration to understand scaling dynamics.
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Quick takeaways
- Organisms' metabolic rate scales with weight revealing efficient resource utilization.
- Cities exhibit superlinear scaling leading to lower crime rates and higher socioeconomic activity.
Deep dives
Power Laws in Biology: Insights from Kleiber's Law
In biology, scaling laws such as Kleiber's Law reveal that the metabolic rate of organisms scales with the three-quarter power of their weight. This means that as an organism's size doubles, it doesn't need twice as much food, showcasing a systematic relationship between size and physiological properties across various organisms.
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