“If you want to know how the world really works, read this book.”
A culmination of 25 years of research by Professor Jeffrey West, a master of complexity science, and the Santa Fe research team.
Both biological systems and human-made social systems follow the same laws of scaling.

Why is the human lifespan only 120 years? Why do some companies thrive while others fail? Why does the pace of life and innovation continue to accelerate? A unique exploration of the patterns and principles that govern growth, innovation, aging, and death in all living things—from cells to ecosystems, cities, social networks, and even corporations.
"The Theory of Everything" offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between natural laws and human civilization! Population growth, urbanization, energy and environmental issues, aging, cancer, human lifespan, the accelerating pace of life, global sustainability... This groundbreaking research offers startling insights into the major and pressing issues facing humanity today.

The average number of times a heart beats in a lifetime is roughly the same in all mammals.
While small animals like mice live for only a few years, large mammals like whales can live for over 100 years, yet their hearts beat at roughly the same rate.
...
These surprising regularities strongly suggest that there is a common conceptual structure underlying all these very different and highly complex phenomena, and that the dynamics, growth, and organizational systems of animals, plants, and human social behavior, as well as those of cities and corporations, follow essentially similar general 'laws'.
--- p.14

That's a huge number.
This means that an average of about 1.5 million people will move to the city every week for the next 35 years.
If you think about it this way, it will be easier to get a feel for what it means.
If today is August 22nd, then on October 22nd there will be another place on Earth the size of New York City, another around Christmas time, and another again on February 22nd.
From now until the middle of this century, a new city the size of New York will be built on Earth every two months.
And let's also keep in mind that we're not talking about New York City, which has a population of just 8 million, but the greater New York City area, which has a population of 15 million.

Perhaps the most surprising and ambitious urbanization project on Earth is taking place in China.
The Chinese government is pushing ahead with plans to build 300 new cities with populations exceeding one million over the next 20 to 25 years.
--- p.22~23

Cities are remarkably resilient, and most have survived.
Consider the remarkable case of these two cities, which were hit by atomic bombs 70 years ago, only taking 30 years to rebuild.
It's extremely difficult to kill a city! On the other hand, animals and corporations are relatively easy to kill.
And almost all of them die in the end.
--- p.24

Why don't people live longer than 123 years? Where did the enigmatic Old Testament statement about a human lifespan of 70 years come from? Couldn't someone live 1,000 years like the mythical Methuselah? In contrast, most businesses only last a few years.
Half of all publicly traded companies in the United States disappear within ten years of entering the stock market.
A few live considerably longer, but almost all seem to follow in the footsteps of companies like Montgomery Ward, TWA, Studebaker, and Lehman Brothers.
Why is that? --- p.26

A typical complex system is one in which, once a large number of individual components or agents come together, collective characteristics emerge that are not usually apparent from the characteristics of the individual components or agents, nor can they be easily predicted from their characteristics.
For example, you are much more than just a collection of cells, and your cells are much more than just a collection of all the molecules that make them up.
--- p.39

The network determines the rate at which energy and resources are delivered to cells, and thus sets the pace of all physiological processes.
Because cells are constrained to operate systematically more slowly in larger organisms than in smaller ones, the pace of life systematically decreases with increasing size.
Thus, larger mammals live longer, take longer to mature, have slower heart rates, and have cells that work less hard than smaller mammals, all in the same predictable pattern.
Small creatures live in the fast lane, while large creatures spend their entire lives moving more efficiently, but more cumbersomely.
Compare a mouse that moves quickly to an elephant that walks slowly.
--- p.48

In drug development and the investigation of many diseases, a significant portion of research is conducted in so-called model animals.
Model animals are usually standard mouse populations whose characteristics have been precisely refined through crossbreeding for research purposes.
A fundamental question in medical and pharmaceutical research is how to scale the results from such studies to humans.
--- p.80

Parents have probably had the experience of worrying about how much to increase or decrease the dosage of medicine based on their child's weight when their child is suffering from various symptoms such as fever, cold, or otitis media.
Long ago, I was trying to calm a crying baby with a high fever in the middle of the night and was shocked to read the recommended dosage on a bottle of infant Tylenol.
This is because the dosage was written in a linear increase according to body weight.
Knowing Tusco's tragic story well, I was a little worried.
The bottle had a small chart showing how much medicine to give based on age and weight.
For example, a baby weighing 2.7 kilograms would be fed one-quarter teaspoon (40 milligrams), while a baby weighing 16 kilograms (six times heavier) would be fed exactly six times as much, or one and a half teaspoons (240 milligrams).
However, if we follow the nonlinear 2/3 scaling law, then it is correct to increase the capacity to 3.3, which is 6 to the 2/3 power.
So, you should be feeding 132 milligrams, just over half the recommended daily allowance! So, if the recommendation to feed a 2.7-kilogram baby a quarter teaspoon is correct, then feeding a 1.5-teaspoon serving to a 16-kilogram baby is almost twice as much.
--- p.84

Whales live in the ocean, elephants have long trunks, giraffes have long necks, we walk on two legs, and dormouse scurries around in hiding, but despite these obvious differences, we are all largely nonlinearly scaled versions of each other.
If you tell me the size of any mammal, I can use scaling laws to tell me almost anything about the average values ​​of its measurable characteristics.
How much food they need to eat each day, what their heart rate is, how long it takes them to mature, what is the length and diameter of their aorta, how long they will live, how many offspring they will have, and so on.
This is an astonishing fact, considering the incredible complexity and diversity of life.
--- p.141

Even a smaller change in temperature, say 2 degrees Celsius, can change growth and mortality rates by 20 to 30 percent.
This is a huge number, and therefore the root of our problem.
If global temperatures rise by about 2 degrees Celsius due to global warming—we're currently on that trajectory—the rate of nearly all biological life across all scales will increase by a staggering 20 to 30 percent.
This is by no means a trivial problem and will have disastrous consequences for the ecosystem.
--- p.249

To describe this much shorter and more intensive period that began with the Industrial Revolution, I would like to introduce a new term:
So I propose the name Urbanocene.
--- p.298

Almost all the economists I've met have automatically dismissed the traditional Malthusian notion that a collapse is imminent or eventual as naive, simplistic, or just plain wrong.
On the other hand, I thought it was crazy that almost every physicist or ecologist I met didn't believe in the concept.
Perhaps the best expression of that thought was given to the U.S. Congress by the late economics maverick Kenneth Boulding:
“Anyone who believes that exponential growth can continue indefinitely in a finite world is either a lunatic or an economist.”
Most economists, social scientists, politicians, and CEOs justify their optimistic views by chanting the cliche "innovation" as a magic wand that promises to keep us exponentially afloat.
--- p.318~319

To put it another way, the energy we process to maintain our standard of living has remained at just a few hundred watts for hundreds of thousands of years.
Until the formation of urban communities about 10,000 years ago.
That was the beginning of the Anthropocene, and since then the effective metabolic rate has steadily increased, currently exceeding 3,000 watts.
But this is only an average across the globe.
Developed countries have much higher energy consumption rates.
The United States uses 11,000 watts, almost four times that amount.
It is more than 100 times the 'natural' biological value.
This consumption is not much less than the metabolic rate of a blue whale, which weighs more than 1,000 times more than us.
If we think of ourselves as animals that expend 30 times more energy than we 'should' given our body size, then the effective population of the Earth seems to be much larger than the 7.3 billion people who actually live there.
In a very real sense, we act as if we were at least 30 times more populated.
That is, the Earth's population is a whopping 200 billion people.
If the most optimistic affluenceists are right and the world population reaches 10 billion by the end of this century, and everyone enjoys a standard of living comparable to that of the United States, the effective population will exceed 1 trillion.
This thought experiment not only gives us a sense of the magnitude of our energy consumption, but also highlights how far we are from ecological equilibrium compared to other creatures in the 'natural world.'
Equally important, this massive increase in energy expenditure occurred over an extremely short period of evolutionary time, leaving little time for any systematic adjustments or adaptations to occur to address its impact.
--- p.326~327

What's interesting is that, as you can see in the figure, this index, which shows the growth pattern of the number of gas stations, has almost the same value in all countries.
This value, about 0.85, is less than 1.
To borrow a term from earlier, this is low-linear scaling.
That is, with systematic economies of scale at work, larger cities require fewer gas stations per capita.
So, on average, gas stations in larger cities serve more people and therefore sell more fuel each month.
To put it another way, every time the population doubles, a city only needs about 85 percent more gas stations.
You might have naively expected it to be twice as much, but that's not the case.
So, when the population doubles, about 15 percent is systematically saved.
For example, if you compare a small town with a population of about 50,000 people to a large city with a population of 5 million, which is 100 times larger, you will see that this effect is very large.
Just increasing the number of gas stations by about 50 times could fuel 100 times more people.
So, on a per capita basis, a large city needs only half as many gas stations as a small city.
--- p.378

As cities get bigger, wages rise, GDP grows, crime rates rise, AIDS and flu cases rise, restaurants grow, and patents increase.
All of this follows the '15 percent rule' on a per capita basis in urban systems around the world.
So the bigger the city, the more innovative 'social capital' it creates, and as a result, the average citizen owns, produces, and consumes more, whether it's goods, resources, or ideas.
This is good news about the city and what makes it so attractive and alluring.
On the other hand, cities also have a dark side, and that's the bad news.
Almost equally as positive indicators, negative indicators of human social behavior also increase systematically as cities grow.
Doubling a city's size increases per capita wages, wealth, and innovation by 15 percent, but also increases crime, pollution, and disease by a similar amount.
So the good, the bad, and the ugly all come together in an integrated, almost predictable package.
People may be drawn to bigger cities by greater innovation, opportunity, wages, and "vibrancy," but they can also expect to face increased levels of trash, thieves, enteritis, and AIDS.
--- p.383

Whenever I give a lecture, before showing this graph, I ask the audience what they think the industry with the highest ratio is in New York City.
So far, no one has gotten the answer right.
The same was true when we asked entrepreneurs and managers running businesses in New York City.
This is an interesting case study that shows what can be learned when taking a simple, principle-based analytical approach.
The largest occupation in New York is legislative.
--- p.506

One important aspect of scaling a business is that many of its key metrics scale sublinearly, like a living organism, rather than superlinearly, like a city.
This suggests that not only are corporations more like living organisms than cities, but that economies of scale, rather than innovation and yield, dominate.
This has profound implications for the life cycle of a company, especially its growth and mortality rates.
As we saw in Chapter 4, sublinear scaling in biology leads to bounded growth and finite lifespans, whereas, as we saw in Chapter 8, superlinear scaling in cities (and economies) leads to open growth.
Therefore, the sublinear scaling of a company implies that the company will eventually stop growing and ultimately die. This is not a prediction CEOs should cherish.
--- p.539~540

Unfortunately, things are not that simple.
There is another major problem.
It's a serious problem.
The theory states that for sustained growth to be maintained, the time interval between successive innovations must become increasingly shorter.
Therefore, the pace at which paradigm-shifting discoveries, adaptations, and innovations occur must accelerate.
Not only is the overall pace of life accelerating, but we must also innovate at an ever-increasing rate!
This point is illustrated in Figure 78.
The black dots, which signal the start of each new innovation cycle, get closer and closer together as time passes.
As we move up each growth curve, not only does the pace of life accelerate, but we also have to make major innovations and move to new states at an ever-increasing pace.
The treadmill metaphor, which I used in Chapters 1 and 8 to explain the shrinking of socioeconomic time and the increasing pace of life, is only part of the story and deserves further expansion here.
Not only are we constantly on an accelerating treadmill that is getting faster and faster, but at some point we have to jump to another treadmill that is accelerating at an even faster rate, and then we have to move on to another treadmill that is moving even faster in a shorter period of time.
And this whole process must be repeated over and over again, at an increasingly faster rate.
This sounds like a surprising and slightly bizarre psychotic behavior.
If we try to do that, we'll probably have a mass heart attack! It'll make the Sisyphus task seem trivial.
You may remember the story of how the gods punished Sisyphus by forcing him to roll a huge rock up a mountain.
As soon as the rock reaches the top of the mountain, it rolls back down, and Sisyphus has to start from the bottom again.

--- p.575~577