Geoffrey West: "Metabolism and the Hidden Laws of Biology" | The Great Simplification

(Conversation recorded on March 12th, 2024)

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.


For Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.co...

0:00 - Intro
2:45 - Kleiber's Law
9:34 - Extending Kleiber's Law
13:59 - Social Metabolic Rate
21:26 - Kleiber's Law vs Social Metabolism
25:13 - Maximum Power Principle
32:13 - Was Scaling Inevitable?
39:20 - Can This Be Governed?
44:57 - Can We Change Our Metabolism?
50:15 - The Source of Energy
54:24 - The Global Metabolism
57:21 - Decentralization
1:02:41 - The 80/20 Rule
1:04:38 - Cities as Cancer
1:09:49 - City Planning
1:15:26 - Do Cities Die Like Organisms?
1:17:39 - Are Our Governments Like Cities Or Companies?
1:20:12 - Other Areas of Interest
1:29:30 - Personal Advice
1:35:10 - Future Topics