Jonah Lerer, the author of the article is a brilliant guy, but a lot of his writing makes interesting claims that don't really hold up when you get into the details. In Geoffrey West he seems to have found his perfect subject: "While listening to West talk about cities, it’s easy to forget that his confident pronouncements are mere correlations, and that his statistics can only hint at possible explanations."

And as davidmathers pointed out: "Every fundamental law has exceptions."

Lehrer finds a really interesting angle to explain something, tries to apply that to a lot of things, and that's when it falls apart. See http://www.amazon.com/Proust-Was-Neuroscientist-Jonah-Lehrer...