Book Reviewed - Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies by Geoffrey West

The nature of complexity The philosophical framework presented in this book represents a physicists’ perspective which states that one universal principle of scaling law applies for all complex systems such as living systems, cities, or companies. And this scaling law reflects systematic regularities from geometric and dynamical behaviors. For example, for a mammalian system, the author argues that a network that supply energy and remove waste from the animal’s system leads to the outgrowth of circulatory network constructed according to size of the mammal in question. This is the principle of scaling law that he argues also applies to all complex systems like cities and corporations and to living systems. The scaling law falls short of explaining the complexity that arises when matter (non-living) transitions to living matter (living cell) by caging a set of biomolecules in a highly organized manner that appears to contradict the second law of thermodynamics. In this scenario, less information creates more information, disorder becomes order, non-living matter becomes living where the newly created entity becomes independent and self-regulating that becomes aware of surviving, adapting, growing, and multiplying itself. Consciousness seems to pervade the living cell that continues to adapt and evolve. Consciousness seems to pervade spacetime where matter and energy behave according to the laws of physics. The physical reality we observe, and experience is based on the reality we perceive here on earth. The observable reality consists of 5% of visible matter and the rest 95% is made of dark matter and dark energy. We still don’t know the nature of spacetime and how reality appears for other living species in the cosmos. Near extreme gravity, where spacetime is highly curved (close to black holes,) the images look highly distorted. Scaling law is a highly simplified concept, and one may question author’s contention that it has universal application. The author is from the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a reputed research institution dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of complex adaptive physical, computational, biological, and social systems.