Flies, elephants, cities, and ideas

[Sara S]

from delancy place.com:

In today's excerpt - flies, elephants, cities, and ideas:

"Scientists and animal lovers had long observed that as life gets bigger, it slows
down. Flies live for hours or days; elephants live for half-centuries. The hearts
of birds and small mammals pump blood much faster than those of giraffes and blue
whales. But the relationship between size and speed didn't seem to be a linear one.
A horse might be five hundred times heavier than a rabbit, yet its pulse certainly
wasn't five hundred times slower than the rabbit's. After a formidable series of
measurements in his Davis lab, [Swiss scientist Max] Kleiber discovered that this
scaling phenomenon stuck to an unvarying mathematical script called 'negative quarter-power
scaling.' If you plotted mass versus metabolism on a logarithmic grid, the result
was a perfectly straight line that led from rats and pigeons all the way up to bulls
and hippopotami. ...

"The more species Kleiber and his peers analyzed, the clearer the equation became:
metabolism scales to mass to the negative quarter power. The math is simple enough:
you take the square root of 1,000, which is (approximately) 31, and then take the
square root of 31, which is (again, approximately) 5.5. This means that a cow, which
is roughly a thousand times heavier than a woodchuck, will, on average, live 5.5
times longer, and have a heart rate that is 5.5 times slower than the woodchuck's.
As the science writer George Johnson once observed, one lovely consequence of Kleiber's
law is that the number of heartbeats per lifetime tends to be stable from species
to species. Bigger animals just take longer to use up their quota. ...

"Several years ago, the theoretical physicist Geoffrey West decided to investigate
whether Kleiber's law applied to one of life's largest creations: the superorganisms
of human-built cities. Did the 'metabolism' of urban life slow down as cities grew
in size? Was there an underlying pattern to the growth and pace of life of metropolitan
systems? Working out of the legendary Santa Fe Institute, where he served as president
until 2009, West assembled an international team of researchers and advisers to
collect data on dozens of cities around the world, measuring everything from crime
to household electrical consumption, from new patents to gasoline sales.

"When they finally crunched the numbers, West and his team were delighted to discover
that Kleiber's negative quarter-power scaling governed the energy and transportation
growth of city living. The number of gasoline stations, gasoline sales, road surface
area, the length of electrical cables: all these factors follow the exact same power
law that governs the speed with which energy is expended in biological organisms.
If an elephant was just a scaled-up mouse, then, from an energy perspective, a city
was just a scaled-up elephant.

"But the most fascinating discovery in West's research came from the data that didn't
turn out to obey Kleiber's law. West and his team discovered another power law lurking
in their immense database of urban statistics. Every datapoint that involved creativity
and innovation-patents, R&D budgets, 'supercreative' professions, inventors-also
followed a quarter-power law, in a way that was every bit as predictable as Kleiber's
law. But there was one fundamental difference: the quarter-power law governing innovation
was positive, not negative. A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn't
ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative. A metropolis
fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative.

"Kleiber's law proved that as life gets bigger, it slows down. But West's model
demonstrated one crucial way in which human-built cities broke from the patterns
of biological life: as cities get bigger, they generate ideas at a faster clip.
This is what we call 'superlinear scaling': if creativity scaled with size in a
straight, linear fashion, you would of course find more patents and inventions
in a larger city, but the number of patents and inventions per capita would be stable.
West's power laws suggested something far more provocative: that despite all the
noise and crowding and distraction, the average resident of a metropolis with a
population of five million people was almost three times more creative than the
average resident of a town of a hundred thousand."

Author:

Steve Johnson

Title:

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Publisher:

Riverhead Books a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Date:

Copyright 2010 by Steven Johnson

Pages:

8-11

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
by Steven Johnson by Riverhead Trade
Paperback ~ Release Date: 2011-10-04
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