❓ How many heartbeats do you have left? ❓

Mice live for a maximum of about three years, while elephants can live to about 75. Yet, on average, both species (in fact, all mammalian species!) tend to have roughly 1.5 billion heartbeats in a lifetime. Of course, there is huge variation across individuals, given the fact that there is huge variation in the number of years that we live as well as milder variation in heart rates.

This is only possible because heart rate–like many other quantitative measures of organisms–scales systematically with the size of the organism (a result that can seem unlikely if you only consider the diversity of creatures and the vast differences in how they have evolved).

In this episode of the Thinking Tools Podcast, I discuss this and other, similarly fascinating ideas with Dr. Geoffrey West, author of the 2017 book, “Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies.”

Geoffrey West is Distinguished Professor and former President of the Santa Fe Institute and an Associate Senior Fellow of Oxford University’s Green-Templeton College. He obtained his BA from Cambridge in 1961 and PhD from Stanford in 1966 where he was later on the faculty. For many years he ran high energy physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory. West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions ranging across physics, biology and the social sciences. His work is motivated by the search for unifying principles and simplicity underlying complexity. His research includes metabolism, growth, aging & death, sleep, cancer, ecosystems, rates of growth & innovation, and the accelerating pace of life. His work was selected as a breakthrough idea by the Harvard Business Review in 2006, and in 2007 he was on Time magazine's list of "100 Most Influential People in the World".

Check out the full episode! https://youtu.be/sHXoKURiPfc

#biology #scale #socialscience