I recently purchased and read “The Power Laws: The Science of Success” by
Richard Koch and – you are right – I was sucked into it by the title.  The
book was published last year by Nicholas Brealey Publishing) in the UK and
will be published in the US in August, under the (less misleading)
title “The Natural Laws of Business: applying the theories of Darwin,
Einstein and Newton to achieve business success”.

On page 1 the author says “Science presents us with a few universal
patterns of how things _really_ work, rules and relationships that contain
tremendous insight, not just within specific disciplines, but also outside
them, in business and life generally ... I have tried to identify the most
important and relevant of these patterns, rules and relationships, which I
have called ‘power laws’.  I should make it clear that I am using power law
in a colloquial sense and not in the technical, mathematical sense, where
power law is a quantitative relationship expressed in an equation.”

Nevertheless I bought the book and thought I’d pass on my impressions to
you.

Koch identifies 93 theories, laws etc. and goes through them drawing out
their application to business.  In many cases the application is by analogy
and for two sets of his “laws” there is relevance to EvFit.   The first
concerns evolutionary psychology which fascinates me (though seems to
interest most readers of these postings far less).

The second concerns chaos and complexity.  To quote again (p 7): “It turns
out that most things in the world – including the weather, the brain,
cities, economies, history and people – are ‘non-linear systems’ which
means that they don’t behave in the straight forward way assumed by all
scientists from Isaac Newton to the end of the nineteenth century.  Non-
linear systems don’t have simple causes and effects; they don’t behave like
mechanical objects; everything is interrelated; equilibrium is elusive and
fleeting; small and even trivial causes can have massive effects ... this
is a world where classical ‘Newtonian’ cause-and effect logic can get you
into a lot of trouble.  Yet scientists have discovered remarkably
consistent laws and patterns...”

Where is this leading?  Well, as Art says on his site: “When the body is
viewed as a complex adaptive system exploiting evolved mechanisms, it
becomes clear that conventional thinking about diets and obesity is wrong.
The human organism is an open energy system, operating far from
equilibrium. Diet and exercise programs that are mired in linear thinking
(calories in/calories out) are inappropriate for understanding human energy
metabolism. These models oversimplify the diet and fail to consider the non-
linearities in human metabolism.”  Further, you will find references in
postings to this site to “power laws” – and that is what sucked me in.
What Richard Koch’s book does is to explicate the power laws of chaos and
complexity and apply them to the world of business.  But, as he does that,
he makes it easier for a non-mathematician like me to understand how these
theories might also apply to human diet and to physical fitness and well-
being.

I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys ideas, but not to anyone whose
interest ends with physical fitness and diet.  If all three of these apply
to you, you’ll delight in this book as there is also a lot on the relevance
of Darwinian (esp. as elaborated by Richard Dawkins) evolution to business
and beyond - and his presentation is not simplistic; he rejects the
simplistic notion that corporate competition resembles evolution by natural
selection (p 301).

Keith