Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas16 Juli 2018

5 | Geoffrey West on Networks, Scaling, and the Pace of Life

If you scale up an animal to twice its height, keeping everything else proportionate, its volume and weight become eight times as much. Such a scaling relation was used by J.B.S. Haldane in his famous essay, "On Being the Right Size," to help explain certain features of living organisms. But scaling relations go much deeper than that, and they are often much more subtle than the volume going as the cube of the length. Geoffrey West is a particle physicist turned complexity theorist, who studies how features from metabolism to lifespan change as we adjust the size of an organism -- or of other complex systems, from cities to computer networks. His insights have important implications for innovation, sustainability, and the best ways to organize life here on Earth. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/geoffrey-west.mp3" social_gplus="false" social_linkedin="true" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Geoffrey West received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where he served as President from 2005 to 2009. He has been listed as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. He is the author of Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Home page Wikipedia page Amazon page TED talk on "The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations" Google Scholar publications Download Episode

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347 | Andrew Guthrie Ferguson on How Your Data Will Be Used Against You

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16 Mars 1h 8min

346 | Erica Cartmill on How Human and Animal Minds Think and Play

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9 Mars 1h 28min

AMA | March 2026

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345 | Adam Elga on Being Rational in a Very Large Universe

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23 Feb 1h 34min

344 | Adam Gurri on Liberal Democracy and How to Fight For It

It's possible to look at the course of history over the past few centuries and discern a movement toward increasing democracy, freedom, and individual rights -- "liberalism," in the political-philosop...

16 Feb 1h 21min

343 | Tom Griffiths on The Laws of Thought

For all that human beings spend a lot of their time thinking, it's far from obvious what that process actually entails. Part of it amounts to classical logical reasoning. But an even bigger part invol...

9 Feb 1h 19min

AMA | Feb 2026

Welcome to the February 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...

2 Feb 3h 10min