Quotes from Geoffrey West

Before exploring other critical implications of the subtleties at the interface between capillaries and cells, such as how they influence your growth, aging, and subsequent death, I want to briefly return to the issue of Godzilla.

Ants brilliantly self-organized to evolve remarkably robust and hugely successful and sophisticated physical and social structures, but it took them millions of years to do so. Furthermore, they accomplished this more than 50 million years ago and have barely evolved beyond it since.

The mechanisms that have traditionally been suggested for understanding companies can be divided into three broad categories: transaction costs, organizational structure, and competition in the marketplace.

Perhaps, then, the most surprising consequence of a visionary Theory of Everything is that it implies that on the grand scale the universe, including its origins and evolution, though extremely complicated, is not complex but in fact is surprisingly simple because it can be encoded in a limited number of equations, conceivably even just a single master equation.

The integration of these two kinds of networks, namely, the requirement that socioeconomic interaction represented by space-filling fractal-like social networks must be anchored to the physicality of a city as represented by space-filling fractal-like infrastructural networks, determines the number of interactions an average urban dweller can sustain in a city.

A major shock at the wrong time can lead to their demise. Younger companies, which are buffered against this by an initial capital endowment, become particularly vulnerable once this initial infusion is expended if they are unable to turn a significant profit. This is sometimes referred to as the liability of adolescence.

can any of this be sustainable?

The strengths of social interaction and the flows of information exchange are greatest between terminal units (that is, between individuals) and systematically decrease up the hierarchy of group structures from families and other groups to increasingly larger clusters, leading to superlinear scaling, increasing returns, and an accelerating pace of life.

After growing rapidly in their youth, almost all companies with sales over about $10 million end up floating on top of the ripples of the stock market.

The existence of these remarkable regularities strongly suggests that there is a common conceptual framework underlying all of these very different highly complex phenomena and that the dynamics, growth, and organization of animals, plants, human social behavior, cities, and companies are, in fact, subject to similar generic "laws.

TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CITIES

We can devolve to develop smaller, or even rural, communities that are just as plugged in as living in the heart of a great metropolis.

Despite the obvious difficulties when it comes to social systems, social scientists have been very imaginative in devising analogous quantitative experiments to inspire and test hypotheses, and these have proven to give insight into social structure and dynamics. Many involve surveys and responses to various questionnaires and are subject to limitations that depend on the role of the experimental teams who have to interact with the subjects.

Yet despite appearances, the interstate system is in fact a quintessential fractal when viewed through the lens of the actual traffic flowing on it, rather than when viewed simply as a physical road network. The traffic flow is the very essence of the interstate and is the fundamental reason for its existence.

So why do almost all cities remain viable, whereas the vast majority of companies and organisms die?

Only in very recent times has a perspective inspired by science and "rationality" been brought to bear on these profound questions in the hope of providing a complementary framework for understanding their origins and providing possibly new insights and answers.

The proportionality constant is 21.6, meaning that there is approximately one establishment for about every 22 people in a city, regardless of the city size.

I don't need three cars and a great big fucking house [for two people]. But I do and I want it. This is the issue. [The Future of the Planet: Life, Growth and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies. SFI Community Lecture, August 29, 2017]

The system we have evolved critically relies on people continually wanting new cars and new cell phones, new widgets and gadgets, new clothes and new washing machines, new thrills, new entertainment, and pretty much new everything, even when they already have enough of "everything.

The time seems right for revisiting D'Arcy Thompson's challenge: "How far even then mathematics will suffice to describe, and physics to explain, the fabric of the body, no man can foresee. It may be that all the laws of energy, and all the properties of matter, all . . . chemistry . . . are as powerless to explain the body as they are impotent to comprehend the soul. For my part, I think it is not so.

Publicly traded companies die through acquisitions, mergers, and bankruptcies at the same rate regardless of how well established they are or what they actually do. The

Fundamental to the conceptual framework of the theory is that, despite these completely different physical designs, both kinds of networks are constrained by the same three postulates: they are space filling, have invariant terminal units, and minimize the energy needed to pump fluid through the system.

is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions

It's extremely difficult to kill a city! On