Episode 5: Geoffrey West on Networks, Scaling, and the Pace of Life
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- Опубликовано: 15 июл 2018
- Blog post: www.preposterousuniverse.com/...
If you scale up an animal to twice its height, keeping everything else proportionate, its volume and weight become eight times as much. Such a scaling relation was used by J.B.S. Haldane in his famous essay, "On Being the Right Size," to help explain certain features of living organisms. But scaling relations go much deeper than that, and they are often much more subtle than the volume going as the cube of the length. Geoffrey West is a particle physicist turned complexity theorist, who studies how features from metabolism to lifespan change as we adjust the size of an organism -- or of other complex systems, from cities to computer networks. His insights have important implications for innovation, sustainability, and the best ways to organize life here on Earth.
Geoffrey West received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where he served as President from 2005 to 2009. He has been listed as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. He is the author of Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. 
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Love going through the back catalogue of these podcasts. So much gold to be found there
Quickly becoming my favorite podcast ever...
/agree
The same here..
me too
Me too! Checking out back episodes here..
Love these podcasts. A true public service. Thank you Sean Carroll!
Please consider inviting Thomas Metzinger or Giulio Tononi for a discussion regarding aspects of consciousness and self.
"Mindscape!" is my reply to the question "What podcast are you binging now?"
Sean Carroll has long been a favorite guest on other podcasts and now we get to enjoy his dialogue as the podcast host. Terrific show!
very pleasant voice to listen too, thanks again Sean. Hope to Godparticle this picks up
for the first hour i was listening i was just mentally screaming, dimensionality!, fractals across a 3 spatial space. Then FINALLY he mentions it. it was like a suspense horror.
good show.
This was another great pod cast. Geoffrey West is a talker, but I found it was a fascinating talk! Keep them coming Sean!
If this podcast had been two seconds shorter, the time stamp would have been 1:23:45.
@awakenessI hope your life has improved since you made this comment :)
jtet rfs - never mind them - you noticed something nobody else noticed - you're a scientist!
Best installment yet!
Hi Sean. Thanks for doing this podcast series.
finally caught up on all these, really entertaining!
Thanks Sean! Love your work!
Saw you on Joe Rogan's podcast. Simply you guys have changed my life and I don't say this lightly. I had no idea this kind of content was out there. I would love to have some suggestions of more podcasts/books of thought provoking content! I need more!
Isaac arthur
Yes, another one!
Like this podcast, hope it grows! 📈
Thank you so much.
For anyone who enjoyed this podcast, Sam Harris also had Geoffrey West on his podcast, they had a longer dissusion.
Thank you sir
Very interesting!
This is really interesting from the perspective of an architect.
Hi Sean, I've really enjoyed the episodes. I'd like to help with a translation to Spanish, I'm not really familiar with the process on RUclips but I think it would be great.
David-- That would be great. I also have no idea what the process is, but if you could figure it out, I'd be all for it.
It appears to be simple, RUclips has a system to manage community contributions like subtitles and closed captions, you can start by turning them on, here are the instructions:
support.google.com/youtube/answer/6052538?hl=en
Should be turned on!
It is, I'll be working on this one that has been my favorite
Regarding the 3-billion heartbeats constant, that seems to be maintained across all animals (30s mark), I think I've heard Geoffrey say in some interviews it's 1-billion, in others, 1.5 billion... why isn't the constant, constant?
Also are there exceptions to the above? For example those 500 year old quahog clams.. or the 5000 year-old Bristlecone/Methuselah pine trees, or the (immortal?) Hydras.. or any of the many very long lived animals.. Greenland Shark, elephants, blue-whales, naked/blind mole-rates? Or how editing one gene (DAF2/PR) can rejuvenate the organism (c.elegans, jellyfish) to make it live longer.
What are the name of the 4 books that led to Scale (33m45s)?
Regarding the Stamp Collecting quote (37m) (perhaps misattributed to Lord Rutherford), I recommend the great xkcd #1520!
Also found it interesting how in biology, it was thought that sequencing the genome would change everything.. very similar to physics but with the higgs-boson/fundamental laws!
1:15:15 Wonder if this applies to Roman cities too, given how many were just laid down in empty, strategically relevant spaces following almost cut-and-paste patterns. Augusta Pretoria and Augusta Taurinorum (today Aosta and Turin) come to my mind
Nick - good question
I was at a postdoc at Cornell and I got to know a man named *Robert Wilson* who was an extraordinary man and he became director of Femi lab which was that period, not the biggest accelerator before we had the LHC and so on and he had to go through some rough times in Congress being attacked for exactly this question and there is a famous occasion when he was being strongly attacked about you know the role of this kind of research and the question came from a senator saying you know Mr. Wilson this is all wonderful stuff it's marvelous to know these laws but what has it got to do with anything for example what has it got to do with the defense of this country? You know it's coming from the Department of Energy where we make bombs and so on what the hell does learning about these elementary particles and the symmetries and all the things you've told us about got to do with the defense of the country?!
And Bob Wilson said *senator I have absolutely no idea how this will help the defense of the United States but it will make the United States worth defending.* You know that's the spirit in which we do this!
Great podcast, I really enjoyed it ... but I'm also a skeptic. At about 1:15:30 there is a discussion about city planners using rules of thumb as though that were bad. Certainly it is bad when you have a better rule. What counts as a rule of thumb and what's just a margin or error? What are the sigmas, the error bars, on the 3/4 and the .85 scaling laws? What counts as a rule of thumb and what counts as scientific law?
Would Alien life have to also follow these power laws? Could we cut down on exoplanet options given some other restrictions besides dimensional ones? Hypothetically could evolution create very different types of beings given different network constraints?
Thork - without a doubt imho
I really love this network scaling. So this is for hierarchical networks, which is pretty much how we build city infrastructure (main roads, central stations). The internet itself made the change to a distributed network. Might something like Elon Musks boring company with the "loop" break one of these principles and allow cities to become significantly more effective?
Too bad we can't have two of these a week. It looks like plenty of people are making "requests." I would like to have Daniel Dennett on to review his most important stuff.
In this media format, how exactly does one run out of time?
Several ask, why do large breed dogs live much shorter lives (Great Danes 8-10 years but often only 6-8) than small dogs such as a chihuahua (12-20). One thought is the difference between evolutionary selection vs. man made breeding intervention. Great Danes, for example, have several health risks likely caused by misplaced breeding aesthetics
Jeff and the Santa Fe Institute should do a talk on the life span of trees which are, I believe, the longest lived organisms on earth. (Methuselah, a bristlecone pine in California is said to be around 4,800 years old). He can apply his three constraints and magic numbers to trees. Also, Doug Adams (Hitchhikers Guide) would like for Jeff to consider the number 42.
1:21:38 that gave me chills!
Invite more complexity/complex systrms experts please!!!
In economics, how does all this fit with individual utility functions, individual preferences, rational agents, etc.? I guess an economy is not an organism in the sense that every cell receives its optimal dose of energy. I guess the organism lives on, while letting cells die off?
4 = 3 + 1 ...whoa
"i knew that" lol
YAYYYYY
Informative, Insightful-Brilliant ! (Biology\Physics). Chromosome-Beads on a String/String Theory. [SCALING LAWS]
I feel like the podcast should be trimmed by 3 seconds for linearity affect
You mean 2 seconds?
effect
I just realized that brain is superimposed over a tree.
It so far has 297 views. Will the view count get stuck at 301, as is the norm for RUclips videos?
Nice talk anyway.
Amiya - uep, sure deserves more!
Re lasers; modern telecommunications would be completely impracticable without lasers
Dumbledore ?
@1.11.00 Sean ask "could internet make cities less important?" Geoffrey "no, because telephone did not do it". Really???
Sean you should replace Kanye in media. The whole world would be better off if we caught 5 sec sound bites every day every where if they at least "bore relativity" :p
(puns intended but not their implications lol)
Overall enjoyable talk. But wow, at ~ 1:22, West sure did butcher that quote...
Could you talk to somebody about the Ancient Alien hypothesis? I respect your critical thinking skills and level-headed approach to knowledge acquisition and have been confused onto my own thoughts on how likely it is, one solution to the Fermi Paradox is that they were already here; after all.
Interesting topic but jeez would be nice if he would not digress so much....
Robert, the guy was buzzed up with passion and enthusiasm, its understandable ;)