362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the most vivid thought experiments or metaphors in biology is the idea of replaying the tape of life. This was popularized by Stephen J. Gould, who had the idea uh that if you went back to some point in evolutionary history and you I don't think that he used quite these words, because he was not a physicist, he was a biologist, but if you kept the macro state of the systems, you kept, you know, the earth and all the critters on it, but you could change the microscopic features, and then you let The evolution of life go on from that point. Gould argued that he might get very different answers, or at least you could imagine you could get very different answers. And

For sure, in the details that can be true. If an asteroid does or does not hit the earth, the evolution of the dinosaurs would be very different. In fact, we had an episode of Mindscape with my evil twin, Sean B. for Biologist Carol, where Where he emphasized all of the contingencies and the randomness and how things that you can't control can have a big impact on biology. But there's also an aspect of what you might think of as universality. There are things that are going to happen biologically, whether or not you play the tape once or many, many times.

Things like this we've talked about with Jeffrey West, for example. Um The Santa Fe Institute professor who talks about scaling in biology, the idea that if you think about the mass of different kinds of mammals, let's say, and relate them to their metabolic rates and their lifespans, They all fit on a straight line on a log log plot, which is to say a power law, a scaling relation, and they can even explain why those power laws are there based on arguments from networks and the geometry of space and things like that. So you can have both, and it's kind of really important that you have contingency and you also have Laws of physics and constraints from

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