Geoffrey
West sounds like the perfect dinner guest. He has lived a fascinating life and
his professional persona has evolved over time from theoretical physicist to
global scientist. He is a distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute and
is one of those rare people who knows something interesting and worthwhile about
just about everything.
In Scale, West examines networks that provide the basis for complex systems: biological systems like the human circulatory system, coastal ecosystems, and man-made systems like urban communities and global corporations. He identifies three defining features shared by each. First, the networks serve the entire system and fill the entire space that is available. Second the terminal units in the networks share common design features and are essentially the same, whether they are the capillaries that provide nutrients and oxygen to peripheral tissues or the electrical outlets that enable access to the grid for home appliances.First, the networks serve the entire system and fill the entire space that is
available. Second the terminal units in the networks share
common design features and are essentially the same, whether they are the
capillaries that provide nutrients and oxygen to peripheral tissues or the
electrical outlets that enable access to the grid for home appliances. Finally,
there is a natural selection process at work that is constantly optimizing the
network function. West emphasizes that these defining features of complex
systems are present in biological systems like the human circulatory system,
coastal ecosystems, and man-made systems like urban communities and global
corporations.
These common features enable West to
identify fairly simple mathematical formulas that predict the relationship
between changes in size and efficiency of complex systems. In general, in
biological systems size and energy consumption are scaled sublinearly, i.e.,
metabolic rate does not increase to the same extent as size. The limits to
growth occur because of the increased demands for maintenance of the system.
What makes Scale an innovative work
is West’s effort to apply the scaling laws derived from observations in nature to
man-made complex systems such as cities and companies. He identifies two
distinct components in these human systems, the materials that constitute the
infrastructure and the creative work that is produced. West then demonstrates
that while the physical demands of these complex human systems, such as roads,
electricity, and water supply, which mirror the metabolic requirements of
biological systems, increase
sublinearly, the productive output like
wages, theaters, and patent activity, which have no parallel in non-human
biological systems, increase supralinearly. Moreover, this inventive works requires
a proportionately increasing input of resources as size increases. West tries
to draw lessons about the rational limits to growth by extrapolating from the
scaling laws that underlie biological complex systems to the two components of
the artificial systems created by mankind. West cautions against blind reliance
on “big data” alone to solve the pressing social problems confronting mankind.
Instead, he advocates for delineation of underlying mathematical principles to
guide the analysis of the growth of cities and companies and rational future
planning.
