It’s easy to take growth for granted, for it to seem expected, inevitable even. Every person starts out as a baby and grows up. Plants grow from seeds into food. The economy grows. That stack of mail on your table grows. But why does anything grow the way that it does? In this hour, we go from the Alaska State Fair, to a kitchen in Berkeley, to the deep sea, to ancient India, to South Korea, and lots of places in between, to investigate this question, and uncover the many forces that drive growth, sometimes wondrous, sometimes terrifying, and sometimes surprisingly, unnervingly fragile.

Special thanks to Elie Tanaka, Keith Devlin, Deven Patel, Chris Gole, James Raymo and Jessica Savage

EPISODE CREDITS: 
Reported by - Matt Kielty, Becca Bressler, Pat Walters, Sindhu Gnanasambandun, Annie McEwen, Simon Adler
with help from - Rae Mondo
Produced by - Matt Kielty, Becca Bressler, Pat Walters, Sindhu Gnanasambandun, Annie McEwen, Simon Adler
Sound design contributed by - Jeremy Bloom
with mixing help from - Jeremy Bloom
Fact-checking by - Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton
and Edited by  - Pat Walters

EPISODE CITATIONS:
Audio:
“The Joy of Why,” (https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/the-joy-of-why/) Steve Strogatz’s podcast. 

Articles:
“The End of Children,”(https://zpr.io/WBdg6bi8xwnr) The New Yorker, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Books:
Finding Fibonacci (https://zpr.io/3EjviAttUFke) by Keith Devlin
Do Plants Know Math (https://zpr.io/bfbTZDJ8ehx5) by Chris Gole

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Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.