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A review by maxstone98
Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey B. West
4.0
Really 4.5 stars I think.
Scale was one of those books that introduces you to notions that significantly improve ones understanding of how life works. Not at the level of Darwin's insights (how life works) or Newton's insights (how physical stuff works) in terms of breadth and applicability and sense of "aha"-ness, but one level down from that, which is still quite a gift. It answered a lot of questions about how things grow and change in a single framework guided by just a few (basically 3) principles. why aren't there mammals bigger than a blue whale or smaller then a vole or whatnot, for example. or why one stops physically growing and how that differs and doesn't differ by species. and how average commuting times change with other variables (to a first approximation, they don't)
In addition to the big picture, there's a wealth of super interesting things I didn't know. Did you know that you can't specify the length of a coastline (or other fractal-y thing) without specifying a resolution? Did you know that all mammals species have (to a first approximation) the same expected number of heartbeats? etc.
On the negative side, and what kept this from being an unambiguous 5 star book, was that the writing wasn't great. The sentences were too long and had too many filler words. And the author routinely started a sentence by saying "it is amazing / surprising / remarkable / etc that...." That's ok on occasion to really highlight something, but for routine use its more powerful just to say something interesting, and not announce it as interesting. And finally the book at times reads like an extended ad for the Santa Fe Institute, where the author did much of his work. I'm sure the place is great, but the plaudits for it were excessive and didn't add to the story he was trying to tell and the information he was trying to impart.
I'm not sure if you can get away with reading just the best parts without the stuff leading up to them, but chapters 3-5 were the real treasures.
Scale was one of those books that introduces you to notions that significantly improve ones understanding of how life works. Not at the level of Darwin's insights (how life works) or Newton's insights (how physical stuff works) in terms of breadth and applicability and sense of "aha"-ness, but one level down from that, which is still quite a gift. It answered a lot of questions about how things grow and change in a single framework guided by just a few (basically 3) principles. why aren't there mammals bigger than a blue whale or smaller then a vole or whatnot, for example. or why one stops physically growing and how that differs and doesn't differ by species. and how average commuting times change with other variables (to a first approximation, they don't)
In addition to the big picture, there's a wealth of super interesting things I didn't know. Did you know that you can't specify the length of a coastline (or other fractal-y thing) without specifying a resolution? Did you know that all mammals species have (to a first approximation) the same expected number of heartbeats? etc.
On the negative side, and what kept this from being an unambiguous 5 star book, was that the writing wasn't great. The sentences were too long and had too many filler words. And the author routinely started a sentence by saying "it is amazing / surprising / remarkable / etc that...." That's ok on occasion to really highlight something, but for routine use its more powerful just to say something interesting, and not announce it as interesting. And finally the book at times reads like an extended ad for the Santa Fe Institute, where the author did much of his work. I'm sure the place is great, but the plaudits for it were excessive and didn't add to the story he was trying to tell and the information he was trying to impart.
I'm not sure if you can get away with reading just the best parts without the stuff leading up to them, but chapters 3-5 were the real treasures.