Growth as a process is ubiquitous. It is the hallmark of every living organism. It motivates much of what we as humans do, as often unspoken as it is outspoken. It is the narrative lens through which we examine societies and civilizations past and present. And it is the altar at which economists worship. You would think that nobody in their right mind would write a book that tries to encompass all of the above. Leave it to a deep thinker such as Vaclav Smil to prove to you otherwise.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities, written by Vaclav Smil, published by MIT Press in September 2019 (hardback, 659 pages)

Smil, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba, has a bit of a reputation. An interview in Science introduced him as “the man who has quietly shaped how the world thinks about energy“, Foreign Policy included him in their Top 100 of Global Thinkers of 2010, and none other than Bill Gates devours his books. He has written about 40 of them – some of which are on my shelf and many more on my wishlist – but I admit with some trepidation that this is my introduction to his work. He has built a research career around energy: how we generate it, how we use it, and how it shapes our civilization. So why a book about growth? Because, as he points out, growth requires the conversion of energy.

By his own admission, a book that aims to cover such a broad topic has to be restricted in both scope and depth. Notably excluded is growth at the subcellular level, including the (epi)genetics and biochemistry of biological growth. But that leaves plenty of other topics. The first chapter introduces the reader to patterns and outcomes of growth without going into the mathematical nitty-gritty. Patterns include linear, exponential, hyperbolic, and (importantly) sigmoid or logistic growth; outcomes include normal and power-law distributions (e.g. Pareto and Zipf). The remainder of the book systematically discusses growth in living organisms, energy converters (i.e. power generators and secondary devices that use electricity), man-made artefacts (e.g. tools, buildings, infrastructure, vehicles, and electronics), and complex systems (populations, cities, empires, economies, and civilizations).

“[…] civilizations have come to rely on ever power-denser fuels, from wood to coal to oil to nuclear”

Before discussing artefacts and complex systems, Smil first gives an in-depth treatment of energy converters as “the history of civilization can be seen as a quest for ever higher reliance on extrasomatic energies“. In particular, civilizations have come to rely on ever power-denser fuels, from wood to coal to oil to nuclear. This is easily the most technical chapter of the book, rich in engineering details on the growth in both capacities and efficiencies of the machines we use to generate energy. It provides a more solid foundation than Rhodes’s book Energy, though it focuses on generation capacities rather than consumption of fuel reserves.

Biologists reading this book might feel a bit short-changed by the chapter on growth in nature. Though Smil covers growth in micro-organisms, trees, animals, and humans, much of what he discusses comes from intensely studied applied fields such as forestry, agriculture, and animal farming. There is less information about wild animals, animal populations, or ecosystems. And allometry – how shapes and proportions change with size – is only briefly mentioned when he discusses metabolic theory and expresses his scepticism of its universal applicability as promoted by e.g. Geoffrey West in his book Scale. For more on this topic see e.g. Wentworth Thompson’s classic On Growth and Form, Animal Body Size, and The Design of Mammals.

Short-changed or not, this chapter serves two important ends. First, to show the many similarities between growth in living and non-living systems. Second, to highlight that few people (especially economists) understand growth and think that anything other than organisms can grow indefinitely. These similarities are not mere curiosities and many systems show logistic growth patterns that result in a characteristic S-shaped curve when plotted. Initial slow growth gives way to rapid growth after which growth slows down and approaches an asymptotic limit. This is as true of the spread of viruses and animal or human body size as it is of the growth over time of the size of building cranes or the maximum velocities of different modes of transportation.

“[…] few people (especially economists) understand growth and think that anything other than organisms can grow indefinitely.”

But logistic growth is not universal and Smil warns of indiscriminate use of such curves to forecast growth. He explicitly bases his cautious conclusions in this book on a meticulous quantification of past observations, rather than making bold predictions. Bigger is not always better (engineers try to minimise the length of tunnels and bridges). Sometimes growth shows no particular trend and periods of stasis are followed by sudden jumps (the size of cathedrals) while civilizations can rise and fall (and rise again). Or growth can be limited by other factors such as cost (the height of skyscrapers). Some of the processes graphed here are caught in an early phase of logistic growth (the volume of internet traffic), while others show the decline that can follow afterwards (the size of the US railroad network). Reconstructing historical growth of cities, empires, and civilizations is particularly tricky. Data is patchy and proxies imperfect. Growth of empires is often measured by territory size, though most areas were only under nominal control – in practice local rulers often continued to be in charge.

I found the section on economic growth particularly revealing. Smil highlights the problems with the commonly used measure of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and alternatives, and provides an eye-opening quantification of the energy and material flows underpinning our economies. Economists tend to either take these for granted or ignore them, but, as Smil has written elsewhere, we are still living in the iron age. The widespread techno-optimism that has come with Moore’s law and the astounding advances in computing power is misplaced and he is critical of dematerialization advocates, pointing out that, in absolute terms, we are only using more of everything.

Growth is a whopper of a book: 659 pages, with a 99-page reference section. And Smil knows it: twice he refers to the “persevering reader”. Early on he warns that his systematic quantification is “unavoidably repetitive” and parts of the book are indeed somewhat dull. There is no grand theory being pushed here. But that is the whole point of the book: “grand predictions turn out to be, repeatedly, wrong”, he notes in his preface. What really characterises Smil’s attitude is caution, nuance, and scepticism. And nowhere does this show more than in his final chapter, where he ponders what comes after growth.

“There is no grand theory being pushed here. But that is the whole point of the book: “grand predictions turn out to be, repeatedly, wrong”, [Smil] notes in his preface”

Smil has, in his own words, a “respect for complex and unruly realities”. Energy and climate scientist David Keith was more outspoken by calling him a “slayer of bullshit”. Next to slamming dematerialization and perpetual growth advocates, he calls the idea of an imminent circular economy misleading (“modern economies are based on massive linear flows”), highlights the fallacy of thinking that economic growth can be decoupled from energy and material inputs (“[it] contradicts physical laws”), and considers sustainable development “one of the most misused descriptors of desirable human actions” that “leaves all key variables undefined”. But he does not side with prophets of doom either, labelling peak oil advocates “a new catastrophist cult” that “mix incontestable facts with caricatures of complex realities”.

On balance though, it is clear what camp Smil falls in. Quoting from Emmott’s book 10 Billion that “we urgently need to consume less. A lot less” shows him agreeing with the sentiments of scaling down and pulling back that Eileen Crist expressed in Abundant Earth. To arrive at this conclusion “there is no need to be a catastrophist”. The way Smil sees it “Good life within planetary boundaries is possible […] but not without fundamentally restructured provisioning systems” (more on that in my review of Planetary Accounting). And, as he points out in his conclusion to the book, we have to accept the “impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet“.

Growth is a book that, well, grows on you. Yes, reading it is a substantial investment of time, but Smil’s meticulous and cross-disciplinary approach provides many insightful ideas – of which I have mentioned only a few – that lead to a well-reasoned conclusion. And as my personal introduction to his writing, it has convinced me that I urgently need to read more of his books.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Growth paperback, hardback, ebook, audiobook or audio CD

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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Collapse is a feature, not a bug. This motto is almost like a mantra to physical chemist Ugo Bardi. He is interested in complex systems and how they collapse. Whether they be human-made structures, companies, societies, or ecosystems; he follows the thinking of Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4BCE–65CE) who wrote, in Bardi’s words, that “growth is slow, but the way to ruin is rapid”. This led Bardi to write The Seneca Effect in 2017, which was reviewed here previously. Now he is back with Before the Collapse, a book aimed at a wider audience that promises to help readers understand and navigate collapses in their lives.

Before the Collapse: A Guide to the Other Side of Growth, written by Ugo Bardi, published by Springer in October 2019 (paperback, 242 pages)

Bardi opens his book with a chapter on modelling. Before we even get to describing the growth and collapse of complex systems, he wants readers to understand how we do this describing. The thing about complex systems is that they are… well, complex. Whether it is the weather forecast or the depletion of fossil fuel reserves, scientists often turn to models, and this approach is often eyed suspiciously or even belittled by the general public. Something that he thinks is entirely unjustified.

So, before proceeding, Bardi wants readers to understand the difference between top-down and bottom-up approaches to building a model, and their advantages and limitations. He is especially interested in the failure of models to predict rapid, unexpected changes (so-called tipping points, though Bardi calls the catastrophic variants Seneca cliffs), and their inability to foresee statistical outliers: the unpredictable, potentially devastating, never-before-experienced events that have been popularised as black swans. He also highlights the psychological biases that lead us to disbelief models, whether through emotions, biases, gullibility, inappropriate rules of thumb, or a false sense of security that makes us overestimate the chances that model predictions will be wrong.

“[Bardi] is especially interested in the failure of models to predict tipping points, and their inability to foresee statistical outliers: the unpredictable, potentially devastating, never-before-experienced events popularised as black swans”

With the value of models sufficiently established, Bardi moves on to describe the anatomy of complex systems and the various growth modes by which they can develop. But the bulk of the book is a catalogue of catastrophes. As in The Seneca Effect, this includes human-engineered structures, financial and societal collapses, resource depletion, famines, and ecosystem collapse, but also some new categories such as natural disasters, warfare, epidemics, and depopulation. Some examples were already covered in his last book, including the peak oil concept and the Irish famine of 1845. Others, though, are new, such as the 2018 collapse of the Morandi bridge in Genoa, the bankruptcy of video rental company Blockbuster, the great 1966 flood of Florence that Bardi experienced personally, and some of history’s most fatal wars. Bardi writes of them with his typical sense of often grim and ironic humour, and a bold, fearless attitude that sees him confront uncomfortable facts of life with almost Stoic calm.

The book’s preface promises that this is a completely new and different book, though I feel he only partially delivers on that promise. If you have not read The Seneca Effect this, of course, is not much of an issue. The blurb mentions that “this book will help you […] face failure and collapse at all scales […] and navigate the swirl of events that frequently threaten your balance and happiness“, and the preface expresses the hope that “you will find this book useful for your life and your career“. Based on this I was expecting if not a kind of self-help book, at least something in the way of applied lessons on a personal level. But it seems that once Bardi gets to his chapter on strategies to manage collapses, he has abandoned this plan and partially retreads his last book, though, admittedly, with some new examples.

“Given that we have depleted easily accessible fossil fuel and mineral resources during the past few centuries, could we reboot civilization after a crash?”

So, the option of technological progress against collapse is new. Here, Bardi focuses on new ways to meet our energy needs, covering the pipe dream of cold fusion research, futuristic concepts such as universal mining machines, and our likely saviour, renewable energy. The section on avoiding overexploitation is confusingly more a showcase of how not to avoid collapse, highlighting how politics and greed often come together to deplete the resources we depend on.

Not new is the section on the Iago strategy, previously covered as hostile collapses – this is the dark side of the Seneca cliff, the use of deception and betrayal to avoid ruin by destroying an opponent in, for example, warfare. Also not new is the discussion on different forms of governing resources, the tragedy of the commons, the question of whether democracy and privatisation can stave off collapse, or the example of Japan during the Edo period as a rare case of a zero-growth society with exceptional long-term stability.

“[…] unless you are in a position of power, you have little influence to change or avert collapses. For most people, the best strategy is to familiarise yourself with the concept of collapses so that you may both understand and recognize them”

And The Seneca Effect also already explored the possibility of rebound after collapse, though Bardi here asks the interesting question if this would be possible after the collapse of our current society. Given that we have depleted easily accessible fossil fuel and mineral resources during the past few centuries, could we reboot civilization after a crash? Keep in mind that geochemical processes will not replenish these reserves in our lifetimes, if ever. Still, he thinks recycling mineral resources to kick-start a renewable-energy–based infrastructure could be an option. I would add that we might also want to have at hand ample copies of Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge.

If I have to be critical, I have two gripes with this book. One is that I feel the book wanders a bit. I personally very much enjoy the subject matter and am happy to accompany Bardi as he muses his way through the book. But I do think it would have benefited from both proofreading to catch out grammatical errors, and especially from some critical editorial attention. A revision of the text might have resulted in something more coherent and novel that truly sets itself apart from his previous book, something it now only partially succeeds in doing.

Second, as mentioned above, based on the blurb and the preface I expected a slightly different book with more actionable advice (a six-point summary at the end of the book contains a few pointers). However, given the nature of complex systems it appears that, unless you are in a position of power, you have little influence to change or avert collapses. For most people, the best strategy is to familiarise yourself with the concept of collapses so that you may both understand them and recognize when they are imminent or already underway. And that is something this book does succeed in. I am convinced that readers will come away with plenty of ideas to mull over.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Before the Collapse hardback or ebook

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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If the end of the world is something that keeps you up at night you might want to skip this book. Some might snigger at the “rogue robots” in the book’s subtitle, but End Times is a serious look at so-called existential risks. Former foreign correspondent, reporter, and editor with TIME magazine Bryan Walsh takes an unflinching look at the various disasters that could wipe out humanity, the people whose jobs it is to seriously think through catastrophic threats, and how, if at all, we can prepare ourselves.

End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World, written by Bryan Walsh, published by Hachette Books in August 2019 (hardback, 406 pages)

Surveying the table of contents feels like the roll call of Doomsday classroom: “Asteroid impact? Here. Volcanic eruptions? Check. Nuclear war? Thanks, your usual radiant self, I see. Climate change? Stewing in the corner over there. Pandemic and biotechnological killer virus? Thanks – please stop trying to poke each other’s eyes out. AI overlord? Check, can you please put down your smartphone? Aliens? Has anyone seen the aliens?”

Several of these topics have been the subject of book reviews here before. Walsh starts with the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs before turning his attention to the search for near-earth objects, covering similar ground to the recently reviewed Fire in the Sky, including the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet, a visit to the same Catalina Sky Survey, and an interview with NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson. The chapter on volcanism covers the usual suspects, such as the Siberian Traps, the Toba volcano, the Tambora volcano, and the looming threat of the Yellowstone supervolcano.

“Surveying the table of contents feels like the roll call of Doomsday classroom.”

The threat of nuclear war is a topic that I am less familiar with, and Walsh walks you through the history of the first atomic bomb tests, the arms race during the Cold War followed by disarmament, and the recent resurgence in nuclear weapons stockpiling. Combined with the secret government war plans and the many near-misses, this makes for chilling reading.

Walsh has interviewed plenty of people while researching this book. Additionally, he draws on personal experience when writing of climate change and pandemics. He was stationed in Hong Kong during the 2003 outbreak of SARS and makes many relevant observations: vaccine resistance, the lack of investment in developing new ones, and the evolutionary trade-off between transmissibility and fatality that prevents diseases from completely wiping out their hosts.

“[Vaclav] Smil’s point about the difference in energy density between fossil fuels and renewables […] is often overlooked”

Just as Jon Gertner, he has visited Greenland’s Jakobshavn glacier (see the previous review of The Ice at the End of the World). He discusses climate change tipping points, the fiendish problem of continued global warming even if we stopped emissions now, why addressing the hole in the ozone layer was easy and curbing carbon dioxide emissions is not, and why we all need to read Vaclav Smil’s work. Smil’s point about the difference in energy density between fossil fuels and renewables, and the challenges this presents, is often overlooked.

Walsh attended the 2009 UN climate change summit in Copenhagen and it is here that he makes some of his sharpest observations on the psychology of our inaction. He notes how in Copenhagen: “no one really wanted to do all that much to slow climate change. Not if it carried any political or economic risk. Not if it could cost them their job, or restrict their citizens in almost any way. Climate change was important, sure – but not that important” (p. 137). He calls climate change “the ultimate collective action problem” and highlights how this existential threat, uniquely, foremost affects generations yet to come.

“[Walsh] calls climate change “the ultimate collective action problem”.”

The remaining threats – biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and aliens – all stand apart as ones that have yet to pass. He considers biotechnology becoming bioterrorism in the wrong hands the biggest threat of all, discussing at length the ethics, regulation, and double-edged nature of this kind of scientific research. He clarifies why there is nothing to giggle about “killer robots” if so-called artificial general intelligence were to enter the loop of recursive self-improvement and take off on an exponential curve. And the seemingly unlikely threat of alien life forms results in a chapter that nicely discusses the Drake equation, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and some of the solutions to the Fermi Paradox (see also these two fantastic YouTube videos from Kurzgesagt).

As a reporter, Walsh knows how to write a captivating and entertaining book, even if the topic is grim. Yet I do have some concerns. I appreciate that, in tackling so many big subjects in just over 300 pages, the coverage is going to be somewhat superficial. Although he refers to peer-reviewed literature, I also noticed many references to online newspaper and magazine articles. Similarly, he seems to cite some, but not all, personal communications with people. And when mentioning the work of certain authors (e.g. Vaclav Smil), he curiously cites articles about them, rather than anything they have written.

“there is nothing to giggle about “killer robots” if so-called artificial general intelligence were to enter the loop of recursive self-improvement”

If it seems I am harping on about this, I ended up questioning how much Walsh has relied on second-hand information for this book. Although I trust that as a reporter he can judge sources for their reliability, I worry that he sometimes misses out on subtleties. A point in case is the extinction of the dinosaurs, where he sketches as dissenters those who blame massive volcanic eruptions. Although the evidence for impact is by now undeniable, the relative importance of each remains hotly debated (recent examples of palaeontologists airing different views in their books are The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and The Dinosaurs Rediscovered). And the idea of a global conflagration following impact is not supported by research on fossil charcoal. Similarly, the fear of AI running rampant has its share of dissenters.

Finally, I am not sure I always share Walsh’s optimism that e.g. geoengineering will offer a solution to climate change, or that colonisation of space is the answer to an overcrowded planet. I would not want to exclude these, but I feel as much attracted to Eileen Crist’s call of scaling down and pulling back. Which brings me to two existential threats I felt were missing. What of the one-two punch of habitat destruction and rampant resource extraction? Together with climate change, they are, in my opinion, symptoms of overpopulation accompanied by increasingly widespread overconsumption. I expect these will cause global disruption before climate change can get to us.

“What of […] habitat destruction and rampant resource extraction? […] I expect these will cause global disruption before climate change can get to us.”

If a book such as Global Catastrophic Risks seems too daunting at first, End Times makes a great read as a popular introduction to existential threats. Where it concerns ethics and philosophy, or human psychology in the face of threats, Walsh makes some excellent observations. Keeping in mind above reservations, I would encourage readers to subsequently go deeper into the literature if any one of these topics fascinates them, or consider the recent book The Precipice which has similar but more in-depth coverage.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

End Times paperback, hardback, ebook, audiobook or audio CD

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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“Quarks to Culture: How We Came to Be“, written by Tyler Volk, published by Columbia University Press in May 2017 (hardback, 250 pages)

Biologists are fascinated with these questions, and plenty of books have marvelled at the vast chain of being, trying to discern patterns. This ranges from popular treatments such as Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution or Restless Creatures: The Story of Life in Ten Movements to more scholarly ones, such as The Major Transitions in Evolution, The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited, or Biology’s First Law: The Tendency for Diversity & Complexity to Increase in Evolutionary Systems. Some say it is energy, others that it is information. “No, physics is life’s silent commander”, says a third (see respectively The Vital Question: Why is Life the Way it is?, and my reviews of The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life and The Equations of Life: The Hidden Rules Shaping Evolution). But Volk wants to look beyond this, at, as he puts it, “the whole shebang”, all the way from elementary particles to political states, from quarks to culture, to search for a universal pattern. And Volk sees one.

See, Volk says, our world, our whole universe, is like a giant Matryoshka doll, one set of things nested inside the next. (Actually, he does not refer to these Russian dolls anywhere, I do – but it’s a fitting metaphor.) Simple things combine to form larger complex wholes that have new properties. This is the phenomenon of emergence (see e.g. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities And Software) and is the domain of systems theory and complexity studies. And that is the universal pattern that Volk sees.

But he is not content with calling it emergence, instead calling it “combogenesis”: things combine and integrate with other things into new, larger things at a new level. At this new level, these larger things can form new kinds of relationships with others at the same level, giving rise to yet another new level. And so on, in an upwards cascade of nestedness, something he dubs the “grand sequence”. Now, throwing around your own terms and calling things “grand sequences” all sounds a bit, well, grandiose and reeks of hubris. Luckily, that is not at all the spirit of this book, and Volk keeps things uncomplicated and pragmatic, talking of “things” and “levels”.

“[…] our world, our whole universe, is like a giant Matryoshka doll, one set of things nested inside the next.”

In twelve chapters, Volk takes that logic to reason his way up twelve levels. So, fundamental quanta (quarks, leptons, bosons, etc.) combine to form nucleons (protons and neutrons), which combine to form atomic nuclei, and on it goes to atoms, molecules, prokaryotic cells, eukaryotic cells (here Volk invokes endosymbiosis, see One Plus One Equals One: Symbiosis and the Evolution of Complex Life), multicellular organisms, animal social groups, human tribes, agricultural settlements, and finally geopolitical states.

A final series of chapters looks at the whole sweep, highlighting several interesting observations. First off, as he acknowledges, it is unapologetically anthropocentric. I am sure that following the same reasoning you could draw up other “grand sequences” with different endpoints (molecules, stars & planets, galaxies, superclusters?). But Volk wants to focus on how we humans got to where we are. Second, are there more levels further down or higher up? The latter is something he speculates on in the epilogue. The former, as he points out, is what physicists are labouring over worldwide, with string theory being one, albeit controversial candidate (see e.g. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory versus Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics).

It also spans several fields, from physics to biological evolution to cultural evolution. Volk introduces the idea of dynamical realms, with certain steps (such as from molecules to cells) heralding a major transition, literally opening up a new world of possibilities. Cells, then, are the base level of the realm of biological evolution. Is there an explanation for these major transitions? Here he names one last new concept: the alphakit. An alphakit contains a small number of elements that can be combined into an enormous number of possible ways. The first example to come to mind is how a limited number of letters (or really phonemes: distinct units of sound) can be combined into almost unlimited arrays of words, sentences, books, etc. You can do a lot with those basic building blocks.

“Volk introduces the idea of dynamical realms, with certain steps (such as from molecules to cells) heralding a major transition, literally opening up a new world of possibilities. “

The argument is not so neat that an alphakit automatically signals a major transition. For example, there are only 92 stable kinds of atoms, but the number of possible molecules is huge. However, molecules are not, by themselves, alive. At this point we’re still in the realm of physics. Indeed, how inanimate matter becomes alive remains a vexing question, see e.g. What is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology. But the reverse seems to hold: major transitions seem to require these alphakits. On the border of the realms of physics and biology few atoms give rise to many molecules. Some of these molecules (the combo of four DNA bases and a small number of amino acids) give rise to larger numbers of other molecules (genes and proteins). Same at the transition from biological evolution to cultural evolution where a small number of phonemes gives rise to language, allowing for the next series of iterations. Also invoked here is the concept of a field of possibilities, which are all the theoretically possible combinations of elements. Wagner introduced this in his fascinating Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution’s Greatest Puzzle to argue how evolution can probe these multidimensional spaces of possible protein sequences to rapidly come up with innovative solutions to life’s problems.

Earlier on, Volk makes a distinction between what is and is not a case of combogenesis. So, cells combining to form multicellular animals is combogenesis, but whales evolving from worms is not. The latter is a matter of “more of the same”, not “more of a different kind”. By that logic, the alphakits Volk introduces sometimes involve combogenesis (from atoms to molecules), but sometimes they don’t (from amino acids to proteins, these are both types of molecules).

No doubt readers both inside and outside of complexity studies will find plenty to question and criticise here. I mentioned the possibility of other “grand sequences”. Harold Morowitz did a similar exercise in his book The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, but required 28 steps. And I wonder: is combogenesis really different enough from emergence to warrant its own term?

My impression is that Volk would be delighted to see his ideas discussed. Quarks to Culture is engagingly written, often chatty (a style I personally enjoy). To wade into subatomic particle physics as a biologist is courageous of Volk, but he seems to have read up on the topic and spoken to plenty of colleagues who explained it to him. Volk excels at translating that for his readers, kindling a new interest in me. Despite the questions and eyebrows this book might raise for some, if you read it in the spirit it was intended – a thought experiment rather than a fully-fledged theory – I expect you will find it a rewarding and thought-provoking intellectual exercise.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Quarks to Culture hardback or ebook

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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Sorry, that’s a trick question, for the answer to this is anything but quick. The mind-boggling complexity that is life, even something as “simple” as a bacterium, somehow arises from atoms and molecules. And yet, physics and chemistry as we currently know it seem incapable of answering how life’s complexity emerges from its constituent parts. With The Demon in the Machine, well-known physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies takes a stab at it, saying we are on the verge of a breakthrough.

“The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life“, written by Paul Davies, published by Allen Lane in January 2019 (hardback, 251 pages)

Davies is not the first to ask this seemingly simple question. He takes as his starting point the 1944 book What is Life? by the famous physicist Erwin Schrödinger. Schrödinger and others noted that the very existence of life seems to violate one of the fundamental laws of physics: the second law of thermodynamics, i.e. the universal tendency towards disorder, or, more formally, an increase in entropy. But life does the opposite, creating order and complex, organised structures. If life is to spring from basic physics at the atomic level, how does it do that? Before DNA was identified for what it is, Schrödinger already intuited that for life to go against the second law of thermodynamics, there had to be a molecular entity encoding information on how to build an organism.

Both Schrödinger and Davies agree that this reductionist view isn’t the full answer. Davies contends that it is the flow of information that sets living matter apart. To make his point Davies surveys disparate fields of scientific enquiry. I found the resulting tour to be as much frustrating and meandering, as I found it to contain brilliant flashes of insight.

An example of the former is Davies introducing a classic 1850s thought experiment, known as Maxwell’s demon (the demon referred to in this book’s title). Without going into the details, this thought experiment would allow violation of the second law of thermodynamics, but only by making unrealistic assumptions of frictionless devices running without energy input. Somehow, after discussing both information theory and molecular biology, Davies links this to the vast amount of information management that living cells engage in.

“[…] Davies contends that it is the flow of information that sets living matter apart”

Similarly speculative is a chapter on quantum mechanical effects in biology. At the atomic scale, things behave very differently than we experience in our macro-world, leading to all sorts of counterintuitive and weird effects. Quantum effects have been implicated in photosynthesis and bird navigation (see also Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology). Most of this chapter, too, went right over my head, and Davies himself ends the chapter on a cautionary note.

Closer to home, and thus easier to understand for me, were the chapters where Davies explores the idea of cells doing computations, with networks of gene regulation forming chemical “circuit boards” that can function like logic gates doing AND or OR operations the way electronic circuit boards can do. Or take the question of how random variation and natural selection can give rise to such exquisite solutions to life’s problems. Davies here mentions Andreas Wagner’s book Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution’s Greatest Puzzle (I read that upon publication and it blew my mind – now that’s a book of great clarity). He introduces the very interesting observation of mutation hotspots: specific genes that, in case of emergency, can mutate much, much faster than average. Related to this, he considers cancer (which is, at heart, unlimited cell proliferation) to be an evolutionarily ancient back-up strategy for a cell to escape stressful conditions.

Davies similarly tries his hand at answering the questions when, where, and how life began. He touches on some interesting though speculative ideas, such as the existence of a shadow biosphere, i.e. a group of lifeforms existing right alongside us resulting from an independent second genesis. He believes that explaining life’s origin will come from studying information-processing systems of sufficiently great complexity. Finally, Davies applies his ideas about information to questions of consciousness, free will, and the human brain.

“My concern is that this […] ends up being a form of vitalism-redux, where we substitute “mystical essence” with “information””

Ultimately, my problem with The Demon in the Machine is two-fold. First, its subtitle teases at some sort of grand synthesis. However, the book delivers a series of mostly speculative and often meandering chapters, some of which, in all honesty, I struggled to comprehend. Or really, I struggled to see how this all comes together – in my opinion, Davies doesn’t really tie up all these strands into a convincing argument. Second, living things used to be thought of as normal matter animated by some extra, mystical essence, a life force or ethereal energy, whether it was thought to be the breath of life, heat, electricity, or a soul. On page 8, Davies asserts that this era of vitalism is dead. My concern is that this “field so new and fast-moving that it lacks a name”, as the dust jacket informs us, ends up being a form of vitalism-redux, where we substitute “mystical essence” with “information”.

Davies is throwing out many interesting questions in The Demon in the Machine, that is for sure. If you like a thought-provoking book that skirts the borders of biology, physics, informatics, and philosophy, this book is just your ticket. Time will tell whether this incipient field will live up to its promises, but for now this book did not convince me to come off the fence just yet.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

The Demon in the Machine paperback, hardback or ebook

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

“The Seneca Effect: Why Growth is Slow but Collapse is Rapid“, written by Ugo Bardi, published by Springer in September 2017 (hardback, 209 pages)

Bardi, a professor in physical chemistry, has a strong interest in what I would like to informally dub “collapsology”. That is, he studies the science of collapse – what it is, what collapses on different scales have in common, how we can recognise that the collapse of a system is imminent, and what we can do to limit the fallout when they do finally happen. As he observes in this book, collapses are rapid events, often following extended periods of growth. He refers to this pattern as the Seneca effect, after the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4BCE–65CE) who already observed this behaviour when he wrote that “fortune is of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid”.

The bulk of this book is a catalogue of collapses. Bardi starts small with structural failures, such as collapsing building, avalanches, or cracks in metal objects and how these grow. He then walks the reader through a selection of cheerful examples of past or imminent collapses on larger scales: financial crises, large-scale famine, the fall of the Roman empire, resource depletion (peak oil and  scarcity of ores), overfishing, mass extinctions, runaway climate change, and the breakdown of Earth’s ecosystems.

What all these events have in common, says Bardi, is that they are collective phenomena involving a network of interacting elements or agents that behave in a non-linear way, which often thwarts our initial naïve attempts at making predictions. A defining feature of networked structures is that they are prone to reinforcing feedback loops – hence Bardi calls collapses a feature rather than a bug. These can lead to so-called phase transitions (to borrow a term from thermodynamics), that is, rapid rearrangements into a new stable state. Or, in other words, collapse. Our knowledge of thermodynamics, network science and systems studies all offer tools (e.g. computer simulations) and ways of thinking about real-world collapses as diverse as above examples.

“the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca already wrote that “fortune is of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid””

Each item on Bardi’s shopping list of disasters has been written about extensively elsewhere, and many of these books have by now been reviewed this blog. Even so, he adds interesting observations and concise summaries. Allow me a short list of examples:

• Financial collapses: these are a matter of wealth inequality and redistribution. Scheidel’s The Great Leveler showed these transitions have never happened peacefully. Bardi adds an interesting aside about the history and nature of money and a clear definition of the Gini coefficient, a measure of financial inequality.
• Famine: The Irish potato famine was also described in Never Out of Season. Bardi convincingly argues Ireland’s geology and political situation exacerbated the crisis.
• Civilisational collapse: See Harper’s excellent The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, & the End of an Empire, the subtitle of which is self-explanatory. Bardi instead points to the exhaustion of mines producing precious metals, leading to a destabilised economy, political unrest, warfare, etc. I find Harper more convincing.
• Resource depletion: See Bardi’s thoroughly recommended Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth is Plundering the Planet where he introduces the underappreciated concept of Energy Return On Energy Invested. Fossil fuels become functionally exhausted when extraction takes more energy than the fuel would generate. New technologies can change this ratio favourably, allowing renewed exploitation.
• Overfishing: See All the Boats on the Ocean for a recent history, and the third part of Fishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization for a deeper history. Bardi notes the strong emotional denial people involved often show. Nineteenth-century whalers believed that whales “had become shy” (!), rather than concede overfishing.
• Mass extinctions: discussed in Brannen’s thoroughly readable The Ends of the World. Bardi takes the extinction of the dinosaurs as a case study and favours the importance of volcanic eruptions (large igneous provinces) in addition to the meteorite impact hypothesis.
• Climate change: The geochemical cycles involved are also detailed in The Oceans. Brave New Arctic highlights how tipping points and feedback loops such as rapidly melting glaciers, thawing permafrost and methane release from submarine sediments are all expected to first show up in the Arctic.
• Ecosystem collapse: Bardi mentions the Gaia hypothesis (see On Gaia: : A Critical Investigation of the Relationship between Life and Earth for a good review, and The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? for an interesting counter-argument), the climate of Venus, and the interesting idea that Earth’s temperature has been kept constant over billions of years by the increase in the sun’s luminosity being offset by a long-term average decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels (see The Life and Death of Planet Earth for our planet’s long-term outlook).

“People seem almost incapable of helping their own self-destructive tendencies. But, reading this book, I start to get the feeling that perhaps this, too, is a feature, not a bug.”

In a short final chapter, Bardi explores how we could manage future collapses better and limit the damage, covering concepts of avoidance (through persuasion, quotas, and privatisation), resilience, recovery afterwards, and creative collapsing (i.e. purposeful collapse of obsolete structures). Rather than Seneca ruins, can we see more graceful descents? Bardi is cautiously optimistic but simultaneously realistic: humans are emotional rather than rational and we are dreadful at long-term planning, especially collectively. The short-term cycles typical of democracies are completely self-defeating in that regard (I have a few things to say about that, but I’ll refer the reader to The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies and Against Democracy for now). In an ideal world, we would implement draconian measures right now to avoid some of the imminent collapses mentioned above. In reality, we are going through a period in which political and ideological discourse does not even scratch the surface, often seeking to deny the science and solely focus on economic growth and profit maximization at all costs. People seem almost incapable of helping their own self-destructive tendencies. But, reading this book, I start to get the feeling that perhaps this, too, is a feature, not a bug.

I have two issues with this book. One is editorial: this book is an official Report to the Club of Rome, an international think tank promoting the understanding of long-term challenges to humanity and proposing solutions. I had the impression that an author’s work becoming an official report is something quite auspicious, so I was surprised to find a text with frequent grammatical errors because of extraneous or missing words. Careful proofreading should have caught many of these. The other is more a gripe with the subject matter. Bardi seems so caught up in his systems studies that he barely mentions overpopulation. Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population is referenced shortly in the context of the Irish potato famine, and Bardi mentions population decline as a consequence of future collapses a few times. However, in my opinion, he fails to take the bull by the horns by not acknowledging overpopulation as the root cause of imminent collapses. To see no mention of the need to address overpopulation when discussing how to avoid collapses is surprising. It’s a difficult matter for sure, but one can make a start with Coole’s recent Should We Control World Population?

Aside from those two misgivings, Bardi’s book is an interesting and worthwhile exercise in bringing together many seemingly disparate topics into one framework that should get readers thinking.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

The Seneca Effect hardback, paperback or ebook

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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“Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies</span>”, written by Geoffrey West, published in Europe by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in July 2017 (hardback, 481 pages)

The science of complexity studies that wonderful phenomenon of emergence: when collections of individuals (molecules, cells, people etc.) aggregate and things start to happen that you did not or could not predict based on the properties of the individuals. It’s the whole being more than the sum of its parts. It’s simple rules giving rise to complex patterns. It’s hard to give an exact definition, says West, but, to paraphrase a certain US judge, “you know it when you see it”. The scaling and scalability West is interested in, then, is how things change with size. As it turns out, many properties don’t simply double when something doubles in size (i.e. in a linear fashion), but either increase slower or faster (sub- and superlinear scaling in jargon).

This is something we are all intuitively familiar with. The phrase “economy of scale” has crept into everyday speech with the rise of large corporations such as Amazon. And most of us will be aware that the Richter scale, telling us how strong earthquakes are, is a logarithmic scale (an increase of one unit corresponding to a tenfold increase in amplitude).

After the US government in 1993 cancelled plans to build the SSC, a huge particle accelerator to be used for physics experiments, West and many other physicists found themselves subjected to the sentiment that the era of physics was over: the 21st century was to be the age of biology. With feathers properly ruffled, West decided to apply the quantitative, analytical and predictive thinking typical of physics to open problems in biology. Already in his fifties at this time, age, death and mortality were subjects of particular appeal. But, to West’s surprise, there was no proper mechanistic theory of ageing. Why do humans live for about a hundred years? And why do smaller mammals live shorter lives?

“[…] complexity […]”you know it when you see it””

The first two chapters to delve into West’s research are, for a biologist, an absolute pleasure to read. The famous biologist Julian Huxley coined the term allometric scaling to describe how certain properties of organisms scale disproportionately with size (e.g. elephants have relatively thicker legs than mice once you correct for the difference in length). However, allometric scaling affects more than just morphology, it also affects physiological mechanisms such as metabolism. West’s findings that the underlying geometric properties of the networks that deliver energy, materials and information to cells (e.g. the system of blood vessels) dictates general properties and limits, is one of the many “aha” moments that this book delivers. I will not try to summarise his argument here, but suffice to say it makes beautiful sense and is well presented. It allows us to explain why mammals can’t get smaller than shrews or bigger than whales. Why we stop growing with age. Or why larger animals live longer.

But networks for distributing stuff (whether this is material goods or immaterial things such as knowledge) are everywhere. And West being the polymath he is, the book then branches out to describe how his subsequent research and collaborations have tried to apply these network principles to cities and companies. In his opinion, cities are one of the greatest human inventions, having afforded a stage for many of the social and economic developments of the last two centuries to play out on. Rapid urbanization is generating many challenges that apply to cities everywhere (water availability, environmental impacts etc.). So, can the network principles observed in biology be applied here to describe, understand and predict the growth, dynamics and evolution of cities and companies? West’s findings suggest yes: the urban pace of life, crime, income, and many other things scale in a non-linear fashion when size increases.

Similarly, though West admits this is still very much work in progress, more recent work has been applying these ideas to ask if we can formulate a science of companies. Whether looking at company income, profits, or age, non-linear scaling patterns are found when comparing large numbers of companies across the globe.

“[…] that the underlying geometric properties of networks […] dictates general properties and limits, is one of the many “aha” moments that this book delivers”

A final chapter then asks if and how the accelerating pace of life and socio-economic development is sustainable. He thinks not (and I agree with him), and he goes to some effort to stress that his reasoning is not just another rehash of Malthusian arguments (a topic on which I hope to write more at some point). Opponents have pointed out that Malthus and later thinkers were mistaken by not taking into account human ingenuity and innovation, which have repeatedly saved the day. For now. But West makes a great point that even this tempo of breakthrough innovations (or paradigm shifts) is not scaling linearly with time. How to avert societal collapse is not something he has an answer to, but it certainly doesn’t lie in persisting in continued, open-ended growth.

Despite being a biologist, I found these later chapters very interesting, and here, too, moments of great insights will occur while reading. I do feel that this is where the book starts to lose focus a bit. Given how far removed the topic is from what I normally read and what I know, West does a great job at not making me lose interest and at keeping me on board, making me understand what he is talking about. But he does wander a fair bit, throwing in regular preludes, interludes and other digressions. And that’s before I mention the many anecdotes and introductions to co-workers. It’s not that the digressions are not interesting, nor that the anecdotes are not amusing. By and large they are, but the cohesiveness and focus of the book suffer somewhat in my opinion. An 8-page postscript / acknowledgement section in small print seems symptomatic of this, and buried in there are kudos to the editors who have pared down an even bigger initial manuscript. A further niggle is that the reproduction of certain graphs (especially those containing data points for multiple categories) in greyscale doesn’t really work. Although they get across the general message, they were clearly designed with colour in mind and in my opinion should either have been reproduced in colour, modified to be comprehensible in greyscale, or just left out.

Nevertheless, Scale is a book of exceptional breadth that talks about some really big ideas in a comprehensible manner. It’s the kind of book that doesn’t come along often, written on the back of a long and rich career. If you don’t mind taking your time and being led around many ideas, then Scale is a great book to sit down with and will provide plenty of food for thought.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.