I have always been a knowledge drifter. Think of knowledge like a shiny ball of tin foil and if it captured the light just right — off I went.
During one of these dalliances (post both a B.S. in exercise-physiology and doctorate in chiropractic) I mused about academic life as a bench scientist. I loved the precision required to successfully run DNA samples through a gene sequencer and the way big questions could be distilled into fundamentals — not unlike the phenotypes or DNA fingerprints I was capturing.
But if I am to be honest — and why not — writing the thesis was the best bit. Throw in defending the thesis in front of the entire biology department and it was a big win for me.
Advantageously much of my biology brain remains. It is actually an amalgamation of all the sciences. I loved physics and excelled in chemistry and organic chemistry.
Discovering the work of Geoffrey West, theoretical physicist during research around the metabolism of cities has been monumental. For years I taught colleagues about aligning edges of interests together to tell unique stories but even I was caught off guard by the symmetry of my past research in combination with my work as a geospatial analyst.
His long-term fascination in general scaling phenomena evolved into a highly productive collaboration on the origin of universal scaling laws that pervade biology from the molecular genomic scale up through mitochondria and cells to whole organisms and ecosystems. This led to the development of realistic quantitative models for the structural and functional design of organisms based on underlying universal principles. This work, begun at the Institute, has received much attention in both the scientific and popular press, and provides a framework for quantitative understanding of problems ranging from fundamental issues in biology (such as cell size, growth, metabolic rate, DNA nucleotide substitution rates, and the structure and dynamics of ecosystems) to questions at the forefront of medical research (such as aging, sleep, and cancer). Among his current interests is the extension of these ideas to understand quantitatively the structure and dynamics of social organizations, such as cities and corporations, including the relationships between economies of scale, growth, innovation and wealth creation and their implications for long-term survivability and sustainability.
The scaling phenomenon not only captures biology but extends to cities and highlights considerations for sustainability.
B = βM3/4
The equation or Kleiber’s Law establishes the relationship between basal metabolic rate B and body mass M. The relationship is linear but not perfectly 1:1. The BMR of most mammals increases as the 3/4 power. The larger the animal the more efficiently it functions. This can be attributed (simplistically perhaps) to efficiencies like our cardiovascular system and vast networks of vessels and nerves.
Extending the linear relationship to metabolism of a city we see world-wide congruence. The scaling exponent is less than 1 in biological systems, greater than 1 for wealth and resource consumption.
The point to ponder is if a human adds social metabolism (material flow of materials and energy) to basal metabolism we end up resembling 10 to 12 elephants.
The topic of my keynote next week GIS/Valuation Technologies Conference will break this down in more detail including β > 1 and bring needed context into the discussion.
Paid subscribers will have a link to the talk within a week or so.
If there is general interest I am also happy to host a live chat on how the talk was put together and answer questions about the resources.
Here is a variety of scaling exponents β for urban indicators.