The Key to Everything | by Freeman Dyson about:reader?url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/05/10/the-...

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The Key to Everything | by Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson
23-29 minutes

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in
Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West

Penguin, 479 pp., $30.00

Johnny Miller/Unequal Scenes/Thomson Reuters FoundationCiudad Nezahualcóyotl, part of greater

Mexico City, 2016

Geoffrey West spent most of his life as a research scientist and administrator at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory, running programs concerned not with nuclear weapons but with
peaceful physics. After retiring from Los Alamos, he became director of the nearby Santa Fe
Institute, where he switched from physics to a broader interdisciplinary program known as
complexity science. The Santa Fe Institute is leading the world in complexity science, with a

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mixed group of physicists, biologists, economists, political scientists, computer experts, and
mathematicians working together. Their aim is to reach a deep understanding of the
complexities of the natural environment and of human society, using the methods of science.

Scale is a progress report, summarizing the insights that West and his colleagues at Santa
Fe have achieved. West does remarkably well as a writer, making a complicated world seem
simple. He uses pictures and diagrams to explain the facts, with a leisurely text to put the
facts into their proper setting, and no equations. There are many digressions, expressing
personal opinions and telling stories that give a commonsense meaning to scientific
conclusions. The text and the pictures could probably be understood and enjoyed by a bright
ten-year-old or by a not-so-bright grandparent.

The title, Scale, needs some clarification. To explain what his book is about, West added the
subtitle “The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in
Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies.” The title tells us that the universal laws the
book lays down are scaling laws. The word “scale” is a verb meaning “vary together.” Each
scaling law says that two measurable quantities vary together in a particular way.

We suppose that the variation of each quantity is expressed as a percentage rate of increase
or decrease. The scaling law then says that the percentage rate for quantity A is a fixed
number k times the percentage rate for quantity B. The number k is called the power of the
scaling law. Since the percentage changes of A and B accumulate with compound interest,
the scaling law says that A varies with the kth power of B, where now the word “power” has
its usual mathematical meaning. For example, if a body is falling without air resistance, the
scaling law between distance fallen and time has k=2. The distance varies with the square of
time. You fall 16 feet in one second, 64 feet in two seconds, 144 feet in three seconds, and
so on.

Another classic example of a scaling law is the third law of planetary motion, discovered by
the astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1618. Kepler found by careful observation that the time it
takes for a planet to orbit the sun scales with the three-halves power of the diameter of its
orbit. That means that the square of the time is proportional to the cube of the distance.
Kepler measured the periods and diameters of the orbits of the six planets known in his time,
and found that they followed the scaling law precisely. Fifty-nine years later, Isaac Newton
explained Kepler’s laws of planetary motion as consequences of a mathematical theory of
universal gravitation. Kepler’s laws gave Newton the essential clues that led to the theoretical
understanding of the physical universe.

There is a scaling law in biology as important as Kepler’s third law in astronomy. It ought to
have the name of Motoo Kimura attached to it, since he was the first to understand its
importance, but instead it is known as the law of genetic drift. Genetic drift is one of the two
great driving forces of evolution, the other being natural selection. Darwin is rightly honored
for his understanding of natural selection as a main cause of evolution, but he failed to
include genetic drift in his picture because he knew nothing about genes.

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Genetic drift is the change in the average composition of a population due to random
mutations of individual genes. Genetic drift causes species to evolve even in the absence of
selection. Genetic drift and natural selection work together to drive evolution, selection being
dominant when populations are large, genetic drift being dominant when populations are
small.

Genetic drift is particularly important for the formation of new species, when populations may
remain small for a long time. The predominance of genetic drift for small populations is due to
a simple scaling law. Genetic drift scales with the inverse square root of population. This
means that genetic drift is ten times faster for a population of ten thousand than for a
population of a million. The scaling is the same for any kind of random mutations. If we
observe any measurable quantity such as height, running speed, age at puberty, or
intelligence test score, the average drift will vary with the inverse square root of population.
The square root results from the statistical averaging of random events.

West is now making a huge claim: that scaling laws similar to Kepler’s law and the genetic
drift law will lead us to a theoretical understanding of biology, sociology, economics, and
commerce. To justify this claim he has to state the scaling laws, display the evidence that
they are true, and show how they lead to understanding. He does well with the first and
second tasks, not so well with the third. The greater part of the book is occupied with stating
the laws and showing the evidence. Little space is left over for explaining. The Santa Fe
observers know how to play the part of a modern-day Kepler, but they do not come close to
being a modern-day Newton.

The history of each branch of science can be divided into three phases. The first phase is
exploration, to see what nature is doing. The second phase is precise observation and
measurement, to describe nature accurately. The third phase is explanation, to build theories
that enable us to understand nature. Physics reached the second phase with Kepler, the third
phase with Newton. Complexity science as West defines it, including economics and
sociology, remained in the first phase until about the year 2000, when the era of big data
began. The era started abruptly when information became cheaper to store in electronic form
than to discard. Storing information can be an automatic process, while discarding it usually
requires human judgment. The cost of information storage has decreased rapidly while the
cost of information discard has decreased slowly. Since 2000, the world has been inundated
with big data. In every science as well as in business and government, databases have been
storing immense quantities of information. Information now accumulates much faster than our
ability to understand it.

Complexity science at the Santa Fe Institute is driven by big data, providing abundant
information about ecological and human affairs. Humans can visualize big data most easily
when it is presented in the form of scaling laws—hence the main theme of West’s book. But
a collection of scaling laws is not a theory. A theory of complexity would give us answers to
deeper questions. Why are there ten thousand species of birds on this planet but only five
thousand species of mammals? Why are there warm-blooded animals but no warm-blooded

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plants? Why are human societies so often engaged in deadly quarrels? What is the destiny
of our species? These are questions that big data may illuminate but cannot answer. If
complexity science ever moves into the third phase, some of these old questions will be
answered, and new questions will arise.

West’s first chapter, “The Big Picture,” sets the stage for the detailed discussions that follow,
with a section called “Energy, Metabolism, and Entropy,” explaining how one of the basic
laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, makes life precarious and survival
difficult. Entropy is disorder. The second law states that entropy inexorably increases in any
closed system. West comments, “Like death, taxes, and the Sword of Damocles, the Second
Law of Thermodynamics hangs over all of us and everything around us…. Entropy kills.” His
big picture is seriously one-sided. He does not mention the other side of the picture, the
paradox of order and disorder—the fact that, in the real worlds of astronomy and biology,
ordered structures emerge spontaneously from disorder. The solar system, in which planets
move in an orderly fashion around the sun, emerged from a disordered cloud of gas and
dust. The fearful symmetry of the tiger and the beauty of the peacock emerge from a dead
and disordered planet.

The astronomer Fang Lizhi published with his wife, Li Shuxian, a popular book, Creation of
the Universe (1989), which includes the best explanation that I have seen of the paradox of
order and disorder.1 The explanation lies in the peculiar behavior of gravity in the physical
world. On the balance sheet of energy accounting, gravitational energy is a deficit. When you
are close to a massive object, your gravitational energy is minus the amount of energy it
would take to get away from the mass all the way to infinity. When you walk up a hill on the
earth, your gravitational energy is becoming less negative, but never gets up to zero. Any
object whose motions are dominated by gravity will have energy decreasing as temperature
increases and energy increasing as temperature decreases.

As a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, when energy flows from one such
object to another, the hot object will grow hotter and the cold object will grow colder. That is
why the sun grew hotter and the planets grew cooler as the solar system evolved. In every
situation where gravity is dominant, the second law causes local contrasts to increase
together with entropy. This is true for astronomical objects like the sun, and also for large
terrestrial objects such as thunderstorms and hurricanes. The diversity of astronomical and
terrestrial objects, including living creatures, tends to increase with time, in spite of the
second law. The evolution of natural ecologies and of human societies is a part of this
pattern. West is evidently unaware of Fang and Li’s insight.

The factual substance of West’s book is contained in eighty-one numerical diagrams,

displaying a large number of scaling laws obeyed by various observed quantities. The first
diagram, concerning the metabolic rate of animals, shows twenty-eight dots, each labeled
with the name of a warm-blooded animal species, beginning with mouse and ending with
elephant. The dots are displayed on a square graph, the horizontal position of the dot
showing the average body mass of the species and the vertical position showing its average

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rate of consumption of energy. The diagram shows the twenty-eight points lying with amazing
accuracy on a single straight line. The slope of the line on the page demonstrates the scaling
law relating energy consumption to mass. Energy consumption scales with the three-quarters
power of mass. The fourth power of energy consumption scales with the cube of mass. This
scaling law holds accurately for mammals and birds. Cold-blooded animals such as fish and
reptiles are excluded because they have no fixed body temperature. Their consumption of
energy varies with their temperature, and their temperature varies with the weather.

Similar diagrams display similar scaling laws obeyed by other quantities. These laws are
generally most accurate for anatomy and physiology of animals, less accurate for social
institutions such as cities and companies. Figure 10 shows heart rates of mammals scaling
inversely with the one-quarter power of mass. Figure 35 shows the number of patents
awarded in the United States scaling with the 1.15 power of the size of the population. Figure
36 shows the number of crimes reported in cities in Japan scaling with the 1.2 power of
population. Figure 75 shows that commercial companies in the United States have a
constant death rate independent of age—the life expectancy of a company at any age is
about ten years. The short lifetime of companies is an essential feature of capitalist
economics, with good and bad consequences. The good effect is to get rid of failed
enterprises, which in socialist economies are difficult to kill and continue to eat up resources.
The bad effect is to remove incentives for foresight and long-range planning.

The closest that West comes to a theory of complexity is his discussion of fractals. A fractal
is a structure with big and small branches that look similar at all sizes, like a tree or the
blood-vessels of a mammal. When you magnify a picture of a small piece of it, the result
looks like the whole thing. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot began the study of fractals
in the 1960s and called attention to the ubiquity of fractals in nature. Since fractal structure is
independent of scale, it leads naturally to scaling laws. West discusses in detail the example
of the mammalian blood-vessel system, whose fractal branching evolved to optimize the
distribution of nutrients through one-dimensional vessels in three-dimensional tissues.
Optimal branching results in the observed scaling law, the total blood flow scaling with the
three-quarters power of the mass. Most of the scaling laws in biology can be understood in a
similar way as resulting from the fractal structure of tissues.

But this theoretical discussion of fractals is not a theory of complexity. Fractals have the
simplest kind of complex structures, with rigid rules of construction. Accurate scaling laws
result from simplicity, not from complexity. When West moves from biology to economics and
sociology, the fractal structure is less clear and the scaling laws become less accurate. Cities
and companies have structures that are only roughly hierarchical and not dictated by theory.

West loves big cities and uses his scaling laws to demonstrate their superiority as habitats for
human societies. In a chapter entitled “Prelude to a Science of Cities,” he writes:

The great metropolises of the world facilitate human interaction, creating that indefinable
buzz and soul that is the wellspring of its innovation and excitement and a major contributor
to its resilience and success.

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This lyrical view of modern cities is widely shared, and explains part of the enormous growth
of cities. During the present century, billions of people will move from villages to cities, and
the population of the planet will become increasingly urban.

West presents in his Figure 45 the scaling law relating the number of telephone
conversations in cities to the number of inhabitants. The number of conversations scales with
the 1.15 power of the population. The law is exactly the same in the two countries, Britain
and Portugal, that maintain the most complete record of telephone calls. West considers
telephone conversations to be a good indication of quality of life. More conversations mean
more social interaction, more business deals, more exchange of ideas—more opportunities
for individuals to push the society forward. His word “buzz” expresses his vision of the great
city as the place where human progress happens. He sees the nonlinear scaling law
confirming his view that the great city empowers each individual inhabitant to be a more
effective innovator.

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GrangerWoodcut from Kepler’s ‘Mysterium Cosmographicum’, 1596

West does not mention another scaling law that works in the opposite direction. That is the
law of genetic drift, mentioned earlier as a crucial factor in the evolution of small populations.
If a small population is inbreeding, the rate of drift of the average measure of any human
capability scales with the inverse square root of the population. Big fluctuations of the
average happen in isolated villages far more often than in cities. On the average, people in
villages are not more capable than people in cities. But if ten million people are divided into a
thousand genetically isolated villages, there is a good chance that one lucky village will have
a population with outstandingly high average capability, and there is a good chance that an
inbreeding population with high average capability produces an occasional bunch of
geniuses in a short time. The effect of genetic isolation is even stronger if the population of
the village is divided by barriers of rank or caste or religion. Social snobbery can be as
effective as geography in keeping people from spreading their genes widely.

A substantial fraction of the population of Europe and the Middle East in the time between
1000 BC and 1800 AD lived in genetically isolated villages, so that genetic drift may have
been the most important factor making intellectual revolutions possible. Places where
intellectual revolutions happened include, among many others, Jerusalem around 800 BC
(the invention of monotheistic religion), Athens around 500 BC (the invention of drama and
philosophy and the beginnings of science), Venice around 1300 AD (the invention of modern
commerce), Florence around 1600 (the invention of modern science), and Manchester
around 1750 (the invention of modern industry).

These places were all villages, with populations of a few tens of thousands, divided into
tribes and social classes with even smaller populations. In each case, a small starburst of
geniuses emerged from a small inbred population within a few centuries, and changed our
ways of thinking irreversibly. These eruptions have many historical causes. Cultural and
political accidents may provide unusual opportunities for young geniuses to exploit. But the
appearance of a starburst must be to some extent a consequence of genetic drift. The
examples that I mentioned all belong to Western cultures. No doubt similar starbursts of
genius occurred in other cultures, but I am ignorant of the details of their history.

West’s neglect of villages as agents of change raises an important question. How likely is it
that significant numbers of humans will choose to remain in genetically isolated communities
in centuries to come? We cannot confidently answer this question. The answer depends on
unpredictable patterns of economic development, on international politics, and on even more
unpredictable human desires. But we can foresee two possible technological developments
that would result in permanent genetic isolation of human communities.

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One possibility is that groups of parents will be able to give birth to genetically modified
children, hoping to give them advantages in the game of life. The children might be healthier
or longer-lived or more intellectually gifted than other children, and they might no longer
interbreed with natural-born children. The other possibility is that groups of people will
emigrate from planet Earth and build societies far away in the depths of space. West
considers neither of these possibilities. His view of the future sees humans remaining forever
a single species confined to a single planet. If the future resembles the past, humans will be
diversifying into many species and spreading out over the universe, as our hominin ancestors
diversified and spread over this planet.

So long as we remain on planet Earth, there are strong social, political, and ethical reasons
to forbid genetic modification of children by parents. If we are scattered in isolated
communities far away, those reasons would no longer be relevant to our experience. A group
of humans colonizing a cold and airless world would probably not hesitate to use genetic
engineering to adapt their children to the environment. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the
nineteenth-century prophet of space colonization, already imagined the colonists endowed
with green leaves to replace lungs and with moving-picture skin patterns to replace voices.
How long will it take for the technologies of space transportation and genetic engineering to
bring Tsiolkovsky’s dreams to reality?

Advances in technology are unpredictable, but two hundred years is a reasonable guess for
cheap and widely available space travel and genetically modified babies—perhaps one
hundred years to develop the science and another hundred years to develop the
applications. It is likely that in two hundred years public highways will be carrying passengers
and freight around the solar system, with a large enough volume of traffic to make them
affordable to ordinary people. At the same time, farmers will be breeding microbes, as well as
plants and animals designed to live together in robust artificial ecologies. The option to
include humans in the ecology will always be available.

Cheap space travel requires two kinds of public highways, one for escape from high-gravity
planets such as Earth, the other for long-distance travel between low-gravity destinations.
The high-gravity highway could be a powerful laser beam pointing upward from the ground
into space, with spacecraft taking energy from the beam to fly up and down. If the volume of
traffic is large enough to keep the beam active, the energy cost per vehicle would be
comparable with the energy cost of intercontinental travel by jet planes today. The low-gravity
highway could be a system of refueling stations for spacecraft driven by ion-jet engines using
sunlight as an energy source. Both the high-gravity and the low-gravity systems are likely to
grow within two hundred years if we do not invent something better in the meantime.

Cheap deep-space survival requires genetic engineering of warm-blooded plants. These

could grow on the surface of any cold object in the solar system, using energy from the
distant sun, water, and other essential nutrients from the frozen soil. A plant would be a living
greenhouse, with cold mirrors outside concentrating sunlight onto transparent windows, and
roots and shoots inside the greenhouse kept warm by the sunlight. Inside the greenhouse

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would be a cavity filled with breathable air at a comfortable temperature, serving as a habitat
for a diverse ecology of microbes, plants, animals, and humans. The warm-blooded plants
could grow the mirrors and the greenhouses and provide nourishment for the whole
community. Small objects in the solar system, such as asteroids and comets and satellites,
have enough surface area to provide homes for a much larger population than Earth. If ever
the solar system becomes overcrowded, life can spread out further, over the galaxy and the
universe.2

A chapter in Scale with the title “The Vision of a Grand Unified Theory of Sustainability” gives
us West’s view of the future. He sees the rapid growth of big cities and big data causing
human activities to scale with time at super-exponential speeds. The acceleration cannot be
sustained, since it would lead to a mathematical singularity, with observed quantities
becoming infinite within a finite time. The idea of the singularity, an imminent world crisis
driven by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, was promoted by Ray Kurzweil in his
book The Singularity Is Near (2005). It is generally regarded as belonging to science fiction
rather than to science, but West takes it seriously as a consequence of known scaling laws.

The approaching singularity would force a radical change in the organization of human
society, to make our existence sustainable. But the scaling laws would again result in another
singularity, forcing another radical change. West foresees a future of repeated approaches to
one singularity after another, until the Grand Unified Theory of Sustainability teaches us how
to build a truly sustainable society. He leaves the description of the permanent sustainable
society to our imagination. The only feature he insists on is the Grand Unified Theory, which
will set the rules of human behavior for an endless future. The theory will govern our lives, so
that we will be compelled to live within our means.

The last time humans invented a grand unified theory to make our existence sustainable was
when Karl Marx came up with dialectical materialism. The theory had great success in
changing human behavior over large areas of our planet. But the changes did not prove to be
sustainable, and the theory did not remain unified. It seems likely that West’s theory will run
into similar difficulties.

The choice of an imagined future is always a matter of taste. West chooses sustainability as
the goal and the Grand Unified Theory as the means to achieve it. My taste is the opposite. I
see human freedom as the goal and the creativity of small human societies as the means to
achieve it. Freedom is the divine spark that causes human children to rebel against grand
unified theories imposed by their parents.

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