Wirth's Law

Biological Parallel

The Linux kernel: 170,000 lines in 1994, 40 million lines by 2024—a 235x bloat that outpaced Moore's Law. Software grows faster than hardware accelerates. Niklaus Wirth named this in 1995: feature creep generates overhead that swamps performance gains. Biology discovered this constraint billions of years earlier. The human brain: 2% of body mass, 20% of resting metabolism—10x more expensive per gram than muscle. Ant colonies pay exponential coordination costs as caste complexity increases; dual-pheromone research (2025) documents computational overhead growing faster than colony capability. Hummingbirds burn 1,600 kcal/kg/day maintaining the highest mass-specific metabolic rate of any vertebrate; their enlarged hippocampus for spatial memory taxes an already extreme energy budget. Arctic terns and other migratory birds cut brain mass during migration specifically to reduce metabolic overhead. Crows achieve primate-level cognition at severe metabolic cost—larger brains demand disproportionate support infrastructure. The pattern holds across independent lineages and billions of years: capability growth triggers faster growth in coordination costs. In organisms and organizations alike, every new feature arrives with a hidden tax.