Don Shrubshell photo

Geoffrey West, left, a physicist and fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, talks with animal science professors Harold Johnson, center, and Matt Lucy before his lecture yesterday in the Christopher S. Bond Life Sciences Center at the University of Missouri. West spoke of the parallels between the natural world and social orders.

Crossing the boundaries of physics and biology, Santa Fe Institute fellow Geoffrey West has moved beyond establishing the relationship between blood flow in the body and traffic flow in cities.

Speaking yesterday to an audience of students, faculty and community members at the University of Missouri’s Monsanto Auditorium, West said studying how the natural environment reacts to problems can give clues for how cities should solve problems such as crime, pollution and global warming.

"We better understand cities if we’re going to solve these problems," West said. "We cannot in my opinion we will not - solve the problem by focusing on global warming, by focusing on energy and the environment and then focusing on the market. … We need to create a generation of people very quickly that think in broader terms, seeing these as integrated problems."

West, a renowned theoretical physicist and one of Time magazine’s "100 Most Influential People" in 2006, said that living organisms and biology are governed by fundamental laws such as in physics, and those laws could be applied to social phenomena.

West said the amount of energy needed for a micro-organism is related to the amount an elephant needs. Similarly, the rate of blood flow, relative size of the aorta and number of heartbeats in the lifetime - from the tiny shrew to a blue whale - can be plotted on a line with similar data about all other animals to show a logarithmic relationship.

"You can use a simple physics law to express so many things which look at the superficial level very, very different," said Chen Hou, who earned a doctorate in physics in 2005 at MU and is now a post-doctoral fellow with West at the Santa Fe Institute.

Hou said the institute known as the "Holy Land of Complex Science" draws experts in anthropology, economics, physics, biology, political science and other disciplines to look at problems in a new ways.

In explaining a parallel between biological and social phenomena, West pointed out that some elements of social phenomena do not follow the biological pattern.

"Our whole economic structure and framework is based on the idea of continuous growth. We cannot be biological," he said.

West said societies must continuously innovate and use more resources as they grow, unlike organisms that demonstrate greater efficiencies as they move up the scale from mouse to elephant.

In addition to continuous innovation, the period of time between new innovations must get shorter as societies grow. "It’s this accelerating treadmill phenomenon, and we’re coming to a cliff," he said. "Cities are the source of the problems: global warming, violence, pollution, disease, financial markets, risk … and this only occurred in the last 100 years because 200 years ago no one lived in cities."

After the lecture, the visibly tired but brilliant 67-year-old thinker entertained questions from a handful of stragglers. West offered a thought on why all the complex mathematical equations and relationships across disciplines matter to a layperson.

"I believe very strongly that by understanding in a deeper way phenomena in all the sciences, but in this case biological and physical sciences, that is ultimately what leads to the driver of our economy," he said. "And universities are, despite all the constraints, to some extent one of the few places where unfettered research can take place."

Advertisement

Moms. Grads & Dads A 13 week gift subscription for less than $2/Week