arXiv subjects

Geoffrey West

Publications and source records attributed to Geoffrey West.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Toward a general theory for the universality and scaling in critical thermal responses in biology

We developed a theory showing that under appropriate normalizations and rescalings, temperature response curves show a remarkably regular behavior and follow a general, universal law. The impressive universality of temperature response curves remained hidden due to various curve-fitting models not well-grounded in first principles. In addition, this framework has the potential to explain the origin of different scaling relationships in thermal performance in biology, from molecules to ecosystems. Here, we summarize the background, principles and assumptions, predictions, implications, and possible extensions of this theory.

q-bio.OT↗

arXiv2023

What makes Individual I's a Collective We; Coordination mechanisms & costs

The collective effort exceeds the sum of its parts when individuals coordinate and regulate their activities and behaviors. This holds true even in self-organizing systems with open, voluntary participation where coordination occurs implicitly. Here, we analyze the non-functional actions of contributors, administrators, and bots on Wikipedia, categorizing them by their asymmetric authority: one-way oversight and two-way. This categorization helps us reveal comparable patterns. First, we find remarkably consistent scaling factors for each category relative to system size. Two-way coordination scales superlinearly (with an exponent of $1.3$), while oversight coordination grows sublinearly (with an exponent of $0.9$), suggesting an underlying mechanism for coordination across communities. Second, we identify the hierarchical modular structure of interactions as a key factor for the economy of scale in coordination, and we propose a mathematical model to explain these results. Finally, our temporal analysis shows a shift from two-way interactions to one-way oversight as system size increases. This suggests the emergence of a nascent hierarchical structure even in self-organizing systems, echoing Weber's theory of organizational evolution.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2020

The spectral dimension of human mobility

Human mobility patterns are surprisingly structured. In spite of many hard to model factors, such as climate, culture, and socioeconomic opportunities, aggregate migration rates obey a universal, parameter-free, `radiation' model. Recent work has further shown that the detailed spectral decomposition of these flows -- defined as the number of individuals that visit a given location with frequency $f$ from a distance $r$ away -- also obeys simple rules, namely, scaling as a universal inverse square law in the combination, $rf$. However, this surprising regularity, derived on general grounds, has not been explained through microscopic mechanisms of individual behavior. Here we confirm this by analyzing large-scale cell phone datasets from three distinct regions and show that a direct consequence of this scaling law is that the average `travel energy' spent by visitors to a given location is constant across space, a finding reminiscent of the well-known travel budget hypothesis of human movement. The attractivity of different locations, which we define by the total number of visits to that location, also admits non-trivial, spatially-clustered structure. The observed pattern is consistent with the well-known central place theory in urban geography, as well as with the notion of Weber optimality in spatial economy, hinting to a collective human capacity of optimizing recurrent movements. We close by proposing a simple, microscopic human mobility model which simultaneously captures all our empirical findings. Our results have relevance for transportation, urban planning, geography, and other disciplines in which a deeper understanding of aggregate human mobility is key.

physics.soc-ph↗