Episode 423: Geoffrey West
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The Scale of Everything: Unifying the Sciences of Growth, Complexity, and Innovation
What patterns can connect and unify biology, society, and the environment? How do cities outlast empires and survive unimaginable destruction? Why do buildings and trees have natural height limits?
Geoffrey West is a distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and also the author of the book Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies.
Geoffrey and Greg discuss the intricate tapestry of complexity science, where the life of cities and the corporate world intertwine with the principles of biology. Geoffrey's expertise is in linking these seemingly disparate realms in a panoramic view of the universal laws that govern growth, innovation, and sustainability. Geoffrey explains how scaling laws inform everything from the rhythm of every heart in every animal to the pace of city life.
*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*
Episode Quotes:
Why is it that companies die more quickly than cities?
52:57: If you look at the biology and most of the scaling curves, the points lie very close to the scaling line. Cities, there's some variance; you know, there's much more variance, but it's still pretty good. Companies, it's much broader, a much bigger band of variance. Not surprisingly, because animals have evolved over hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of years, cities for hundreds of years to maybe a few thousand, possibly, and companies are tens of years, if you're lucky, in some cases, it's not surprising that you get tremendous variance. So, if you believe that the scaling laws are a tendency towards optimizing something to be decided, it's not surprising that companies will have a lot of variants because, if they haven't been around very long, everything's still sort of evolving and adapting.
Social interaction and the urban pace
48:26: Giving rise to more social interactions, more ideas; and so on also leads to the increasing pace of life in a systematic or predictable way, as distinct from biology, where that economy of life is the slowing of the pace of life. Everything slows down the bigger you are; you live longer, and everything takes longer.
The classic agglomeration effects of what city does
40:36: The fundamental structure of a social network is that A talks to B, B talks to C, C talks back to A, and we build on each other. We keep building on these ideas; I mean, effectively, they may be stupid ideas, and they may be wrong, and no one gives a damn about any of it, but we forget them afterward, so in almost all cases, it's irrelevant. On the other hand, the thing that's extraordinary about that is that dynamic is what produces a theory of relativity or a Google or a Microsoft or UC Berkeley or whatever, you know, produces; that's what it does. That's what we're here for. So these are the classic agglomeration effects of what a city does, and this is just putting it into a network language; it's the interaction within these networks and the structure of those networks.
The scale of life’s capillary networks
20:11: The thing that distinguishes you from a whale is that, in this context, we have the same capillaries, but the network is so much bigger. So that's the idea. And there's this shrew; you can barely see it's less than a millimeter, but the whale is like, you could drive a car through it, and so, but down at the capillary end, but the other end. of the network when they're the same. So that's the idea because you build up and use those as building blocks.