Geoffrey West, an associate fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, visited Yahoo’s Santa Clara campus to give a talk entitled, “Growth, Innovation, and the Pace of Life from Cells to Cities and Corporations: Are They Sustainable?” His talk sought to answer the questions, “Are cities and companies just very large organisms satisfying the laws of biology?” and “Why do all companies die whereas almost all cities survive?” Using his background in physics, West has developed a theoretical, quantitative framework that uses simple scaling laws and mechanisms to draw connections between systems at all levels, from cells to power lines, to social systems like cities and companies, using the common denominator of networks. The characteristics of life and phases of development apply to both biological systems and social organizations:

• Living/maintenance
• Growth
• Reproduction
• Aging/death
• Evolution

According to West, there are systematic and fundamental laws underlying biological systems, pertaining to resource distribution and economies of scale. He presented a series of compelling examples drawing on cellular systems and metabolic structures. For example, the base metabolic rate of any animal scales as the 3/4 power of body mass. This holds true for all animals, from single-celled organisms to the largest mammals. Having laid out this biological pattern, West set out to explore to what degree this can also be used to describe cities and corporate structures. His findings show that while the infrastructure patterns of cities - roads, water lines, number of gas stations - tend to follow similar economies of scale to biological ones, the social systems of cities operate very differently. As opposed to biological properties, social benefits and ills both increase by an exponent of 1.15 when the size of a city increases. Doubling the size of a city results in a 15% increase in income, wealth and innovation per capita, as measured by number of patents. On the downside, crime, pollution and disease also increase by the same amount per capita in cities. As 50% of the world's population now lives in cities, heading towards 80% in 2050, West is interested in using this data to construct a general theory of cities and social organizations that is quantitative and predictive.