Metabolism and the Hidden Laws of Biology
The Great Simplification #117 with Geoffrey West
Today, I’m joined by physicist Geoffrey West 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.
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.
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?
In case you missed it…
In last week’s Frankly, Nate recasted his favorite book series, the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien, with some speculative “archetypes” of our human world grouped by various timelines. The eventual reduction in energy and material accessibility will likely alter the archetypes that we’re familiar with today - perhaps to become something not helpful to larger society. What archetypes will form a new Fellowship of humans to ‘bring the ring to Mordor’ during humanity’s ‘Bend not Break’ moment?
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Nate, thank you for yet another mind boggling interview! I have spent hours taking notes, reading the transcript, reading Dr. West's 2007 PNAS paper, and formulating questions.
I hope you hold a roundable with Geoffrey West and Mario Giampietro, who also was looking at metabolism at varying scale. Other past guests to consider adding to the roundtable include Josh Farley, Paul Erlich, Joseph Tainter, and Jared Diamond.
Humans have exceeded their activity metabolism since they began cooking with fire 1.8 million years ago, not just 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution. We are truly fire apes, and 1.8 x10^-6 years sounds like an evolutionary time scale. There are so few foods that humans can digest raw, our metabolism must be genetically adapted to cooking, no doubt to feed our oversized brains. Cooking is a form of predigestion. We are the only animals that require predigested food past infancy.
Have you read his PNAS paper? Although it has since been edited, it was published in 2007, before the internet took off, and way before AI crossed a capability threshold. By what factor has the internet expanded social interaction, for urbanites and rural people? If it turns out to be possible to continue to power the internet, the cloud, AI, and personal devices, could humanity relocalize, deconstruct megacities, and resume a new cycle of "growth" based on the distributed social organization? In that scenario, human connection to the agricultural land that sustains us, if not to "nature", could be restored, thus increasing the carrying capacity of the smaller towns (food and waste transport by horse or oxcart), while satisfying the dopamine need for growing social interconnections. Growth of social connections is limited by the length of a human lifespan, so the connectivity of the overall system would level out at some K carrying capacity. Of course, this scenario would require good governance of the internet: elimination of streaming video advertisements and commercial extraction of personal data, and brakes on potential virality of falsehoods and AI hallucinations.
In the PNAS paper, and at about 40 minutes into the interview, Dr. West talks about innovation to cause a discontinuity from the previous growth cycle, temporarily slowing it way down, but starting a new growth cycle from the elevated point of the discontinuity. How do these cycles relate to the adaptive cycle in complex systems? It looks to me like iteration between the rapid growth (r) phase and the reorganization (alpha) phase, yet urban infrastructure, bureaucracy, and (usually ineffective) approaches to undesirable attractors (eg. crime, poverty, drugs) resemble late conservation (K) phase behavior. The latter is consistent with Dr. West's forecast of collapse, i.e. the release (omega) phase. So I'm confused. Maybe the social system is on a different adaptive cycle from the distribution (infrastructure) system? Are there differences in scale? Maybe you could have Dr. Brian Walker (ecologist at CSIRO) come in to explain?