The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies
by Geoffrey West
- Author(s)
- Geoffrey West
- Publication
- London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017
- Scope
- 480 Pages, illustrated, 23.5 cm.
- ISBN
- 9780297609476
Geoffrey West's research centres on a quest to find unifying principles and patterns connecting everything from cells and ecosystems to cities, social networks and businesses. SCALE addresses big, urgent questions about global sustainability, population explosion, urbanization, ageing, cancer, human lifespans and the increasing pace of life, but also encourages us to question the world around us. Fascinated by aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science: West found that despite the riotous diversity in mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal’s circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient—and lives 25% longer. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism’s body.
- Keywords
- sociology , urban planning , technology
- Location
- Cabinet 11 - 3: Technologie + Posthumanisme
- Remarks
- Incl. bibliographical references and Index.
