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Geoffrey West on COMPLEXITY

FQxI

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  • Recommended by 3 people, in Hacker News, across 4 different months.
  • Presented by Geoffrey West, physicist, as the video describes them
  • Debated among experts. Its central claim is contested, so look for the other side.

Assumes interest and some biology. Education, not medical advice.

23K views15 years ago3 recommendations

How the body worksAging and longevityPhysiologyBiology of aging

Geoffrey West discusses how scaling laws and network theory apply to biological systems, metabolic rates, and growth limits.

fqxi.org Geoffrey West at the FQXi SETTING TIME ARIGHT conference, an interdisciplinary meeting investigating the nature of time.

Why it's here

3 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended for its deep explanation of biological scaling laws, metabolic efficiency, and the physics of complex systems.

vanderZwanin Hacker News • Recommends

On “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]”

…n as we realise energy is a real constraint, we'll surely start optimising for it. The third link I posted references Geoffrey West who has an interesting high-level physics approach to this issue, but it doesn't really do justice to his points. But I figured posting this 40 minute one, which is much more comprehensive, would be a bit much to ask: link to this video (also has a lot more phycisist's arrogance in the form of cursing, which I find entertaining myself) Actually, given that city energy spending also grows sublinearly, robot and AI networks probably would as well. So that argument likely won't hold against it.…
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vanderZwanin Hacker News • Recommends

On “Why Elephants Don’t Explode: How Nature Solves Bigness”

This is why the largest animals in the world live in the sea: it's a better cooling system! Also, for those interested to know more, I recommend looking up Geoffrey B. West's stuff on complexity. It mentions the same things as this article and puts them in a wider context: link to this video
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Radimin Hacker News • Recommends

On “Interdisciplinary and physics challenges of Network Theory”

For a great, accessible intro talk on this topic, check out Geoffrey West's "On Complexity": link to this video
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schiffernin Hacker News • Recommends

On “Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B”

…perties of the networks that "feed" each "cell" of the system — circulatory/respiratory networks for animals, infrastructural networks for civilizations, social network for companies/cities. Quite frankly most of the articles on Geoffrey West's work are hand-wavey bullshit, but he outlines it in this talk (including addressing this very question). link to this video…
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schiffernin Hacker News • Recommends

On “The First Law of Complexodynamics (2011)”

I thought that sounded familiar. Geoffrey West gave a talk there, delivering a much better explanation of his research on socio-biological scaling, growth, and sustainability than thepop sci treatments occasionally posted here. link to this video
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schiffernin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Why cities keep growing, corporations and people die, and life gets faster”

…creases as the cube (assuming a spherical cow, but close enough.) Except that hypothesis doesn't predict the correct exponent. If that were the reason metabolic power would scale as mass^(2/3), but it actually scales as mass^(3/4). link West's space filling fractal hypothesis predicts dozens of non-obvious scaling laws, not just metabolic power. link to this video >the mitochondria of a human are not that different from those of a rat, or even an earthworm. West is acutely aware of this. In the talk I linked above he describes biological lifespans in terms of the relationship between the energy required to synthesize ATP and kT (ie the Boltzmann constant times ambient temperature, being the average e…
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schiffernin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Why cities keep growing, corporations and people die, and life gets faster”

>So have we avoided it, or are we just delaying it? ... Perhaps the next crash just gets to be harder as a result. In fact, this is exactly what West suggests (just not in this relatively puffy treatment of his ideas). He's compared societal progress to a series of treadmills. In order to keep up with the necessary economic growth rate the treadmills are constantly getting faster (evolutionary progress) and we periodically have to jump from one treadmill to another (revolutionary innovation) and we must switch treadmills at an ever-increasing pace (shortening technology cycles). The problem of course being that you eventually have a heart attack. link to this video
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vanderZwanin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs”

The lower on the graph, the more energy efficient. The further right on the graph, the heavier the object. So the trend is towards more efficiency per kilogram for heavier animals, presumably due to square-cube law0. Or maybe the 3/4 scaling law12. 0 link 1 link 2 link to this video
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