Comments on: Book review – Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies

By: Book review – Superlative: The Biology of Extremes | The Inquisitive Biologist

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 19:54:49 +0000

[…] applications. Take size, most recently also discussed in Nature’s Giants. From books such as Scale and Why Size Matters, I already knew that most things do not scale linearly with one another. But […]

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By: Book review – Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities | The Inquisitive Biologist

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 12:21:37 +0000

[…] 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 […]

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By: Book review – More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – And What Happens Next | The Inquisitive Biologist

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 10:08:56 +0000

[…] and spread all four drivers of dematerialization far and wide (though see Geoffrey West’s Scale for an interesting critique of whether this acceleration in technological breakthroughs can be […]

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By: Book review – Superlative: The Biology of Extremes | The Inquisitive Biologist

Fri, 20 Dec 2019 15:04:31 +0000

[…] Giants: The Biology and Evolution of the World’s Largest Lifeforms. From books such as Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies and Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales, I already knew that most things do not scale […]

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By: Book review – How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls: Animal Movement and the Robots of the Future | The Inquisitive Biologist

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 11:04:28 +0000

[…] Hu mentions, small animals are sensitive to forces we would find negligible (see also my review of Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies, and pop-science introductions such as Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales and […]

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By: Book review – The Equations of Life: The Hidden Rules Shaping Evolution | The Inquisitive Biologist

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 08:09:29 +0000

[…] on some of the power laws and network-like properties that George West discussed at length in Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies. There are plenty of equations, some simple, some complex, although they are really only there to […]

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By: Book review – Spying on Whales: The Past, Present and Future of the World’s Largest Animals | The Inquisitive Biologist

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 08:21:24 +0000

[…] Another question informed by palaeontology is how and why whales became so big. As it turns out, gigantism is only a recent development in the approximately 50-million year evolutionary history of whales. The search for clues takes the reader from the blood-stained deck of an Icelandic whaling station to study the finer details of feeding and jaw mechanics up-close (including the chance discovery of a sensory organ in the chin of filter-feeding whales that had escaped everyone’s attention so far), to the waters surrounding Alaska to tag humpback whales to learn more about their feeding behaviours. Along the way, Pyenson covers the theoretical underpinnings of gigantism, including Cope’s rule, allometry (the study of biological scaling, see the classic On Growth and Form and limits imposed by physics, something which West touched on in Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies. […]

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By: Book review – The Irresponsible Pursuit of Paradise (Second Edition) | The Inquisitive Biologist

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 14:14:26 +0000

[…] The point is that there is a limit. Geoffrey West also talked about this in the recently reviewed Scale. Sure, Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, The Club of Rome et al. are thought of as a bunch of downers by many. […]

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By: inquisitivebiologist

inquisitivebiologist — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 21:12:35 +0000

The folks over at Kurzgesagt have just released a video on the phenomenon of emergence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16W7c0mb-rE

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