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Publication
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"From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in. The former head of the Sante Fe Institute, visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term "complexity" can be misleading, however, because what makes West's discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses. Fascinated by issues of 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, creating a new understanding of energy use and metabolism: West found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of 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. This speaks to everything from how long we can expect to live to how many hours of sleep we need. 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"--… (more)
User reviews
However, although the subject matter is interesting, it's presentation is not always ideal. The author reminds me of the type of professor in school who could easily get distracted with stories about his past, some interesting and relevant, and some a complete detour into the weeds. He also has a very erudite vocabulary which he uses incessantly making the book a little less accessible. And finally I listened to this in audio and the narrator had a way of reading this that made the text come across as very snobby and wordy. I do think there are some very interesting concepts discussed in this book, especially toward the end. His presentation about paradigm shifts and the future of our world was fascinating and definitely a timely and pressing topic.
I remember trying to improve my scientific results by using log transformations but was always disappointed with the results. The author comes to this field from a background of cosmology so is used to having huge differences in scale and looking for similarities via log transformations. however if you are basically working with monkeys then the deviations between species might be significant and you probably don't need log transformations to see that. In fact, the log transformations just mask the real differences. I guess, that's my main concern about the thrust of this whole book. Sure the big picture is fascinating and can give some insights but log transformations can also mask significant real differences.
For example his Figures 15-18 show the growth curves for various animals (mass vs time) and his smooth curves miss an important feature of such growth curves (it applies also to plants) and that is that immediately after birth there is a "lag phase" where typically the newborn declines in weight....presumably partly shock and partly re-adjusting to the new environment and new feeding systems. I also found myself wondering about his curves showing the accelerating pace of major paradigm shifts. Is it legitimate to include a biological process such as the emergence of eukaryotic cells with the gap between the telephone and the computer. Surely there is a large element of "cherry picking" here where he has chosen events to suit his scale. It looks like nothing of significance happened between the emergence of life and the emergence of the Eukaryotes. In fact, there were huge changes; thermatogales, cyanobacteria, gram positive bacteria, the whole Archaea...including methane-bacteria, and halophiles,