Show Summary
On this episode, physicist Geoffrey West joins Nate to discuss his decades of work on metabolic scaling laws found in nature and how they apply to humans and our economies. As we think about the past and future of societies, there are patterns that emerge independently across cultures in terms of resource use and social phenomena as the size of a city grows. Does Kleiber’s law, which describes the increasingly efficient use of energy as an animal gets larger – also apply to human cities? How have humans deviated from this rule through excess social consumption beyond a human body’s individual metabolic needs? What could we learn from these scaling laws to adjust our communities to be more aligned with the biophysical realities of energy and resource consumption? Can an understanding of social metabolism impact our social metabolism?
About Geoffrey West
Geoffrey West is the Shannan Distinguished Professor and former President of the Santa Fe Institute and an Associate Senior Fellow of Oxford University’s Green-Templeton College. West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions ranging across physics, biology and the social sciences. His work is motivated by the search for unifying principles and the “simplicity underlying complexity”. His research includes metabolism, growth, aging & death, sleep, cancer, ecosystems, innovation and the accelerating pace of life. Most recently he has been developing a science of cities and companies, including the challenge of long-term global sustainability of the anthroposphere. He is the author of the best-selling book Scale; The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies.
Show Notes & Links to Learn More
Download transcript00:00 – Geoffrey West works + info, Scale; The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies,
00:59 – Kleiber’s Law
03:30 – Max Kleiber
05:35 – Logarithmic scale
08:02 – Newton’s Laws
10:51 – ~100 trillion cells inside humans
12:55 – Keiber’s law and forests
14:01 – Energy requirements of ‘the internet’
14:17 – Anthroposphere
16:55 – Exosomatic metabolic rate
17:38 – The Blue Whale is the biggest animal to ever exist
23:01 – Urban Superlinearly Scaling of social metabolism
25:39 – Howard T. Odum, Maximum Power Principle
28:40 – Urban Sublinear Scaling of Infrastructure
29:45 – Dopamine
30:31 – Complexity of the human metabolism
31:15 – New York population and patents vs Santa Fe population and patents
32:26 – Economics for the future – Beyond the superorganism
32:44 – Ronald Wright, Marco Polo, Hernán Cortés
35:45 – Eusocial
39:54 – Degrowth
41:25 – Superlinear social scaling requires the constant speeding up the pace of life
43:55 – Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.
52:32 – Open and Closed Systems
55:23 – Developed countries are 80% urbanized
58:35 – 15 minutes city
1:01:33 – E.O. Wilson
1:02:49 – 80/20 Rule
1:16:57 – Pre-Colombian cities followed these scaling laws
1:17:25 – Resource use through the rise and fall of Rome
1:18:02 – Metabolism of companies
1:21:40 – Why do humans live as long as they do
1:27:33 – Reducing your metabolism would increase your life (fasting)
1:39:20 – Why We Die
