Santa Fe Institute

Success in competition between groups is more likely when competition and conflict within groups is moderated, says SFI Professor Sam Bowles in an essay describing how human institutions and nations, aided by conflict, could have evolved in human society.

The economics status quo isn't working; it's time for a rethink. SFI and the Krasnow Institute present "The Science of Complexity: Understanding the Global Financial Crisis" May 16-18 in Arlington, Virginia. Follow the discussion live on Twitter at #rethink.

A celebration of the life of SFI founding president George Cowan will be held Sunday, May 20, 1-4 p.m., at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe. All are welcome to attend.

This summer, SFI and George Mason University are offering an intensive two-week Complexity and Modeling Program (CAMP) for high school students on the GMU campus in northern Virginia.

In a new study, SFI's Rogier Braakman and SFI's Eric Smith trace the development of life-sustaining chemistry on Earth and identify what they believe is the earliest ancestral form of carbon fixation.

In an SFI Community Lecture on April 9 in Santa Fe, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein considered intuition as an essential part of our moral and philosophical thinking. Watch the video here.

SFI Professor J. Doyne Farmer will lead the complexity economics program at INET@Oxford, a collaboration announced today between the James Martin School for the 21st Century at Oxford University and the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET).

In a February community lecture, Brian Christian shared his experiences as a "confederate" in an annual man vs. computer "Turing Test," offering insights on ways computers are reshaping what it means to be human. Watch his presentation here.

SFI has named evolutionary anthropologist Paul Hooper as a new Omidyar Fellow for 2012.

A market behavior known as herding is not as important a trend as economists previously assumed, according to a recent paper by SFI Professors Doyne Farmer and Fabrizio Lillo and their colleagues.

The Institute has named two longtime SFI-affiliated researchers, Cris Moore and Luis Bettencourt, to its full-time resident faculty.

The tension between contingency and the regularities that underlie historical processes is a key to understanding many complex systems. SFI's 2012 Bulletin, now online, explores the interplay of time and chance.

SFI External Professor David Krakauer and SFI Omidyar Fellow alumnus Nathan Eagle are among Wired magazine's "2012 Smart List" of 50 people who will change the world.

Rather than improving at a (merely) exponential rate as some have theorized, information technology improves superexponentially -- which is to say, its progress accelerates -- according to SFI research.

All living organisms collect information from their environments and use it to adapt. SFI Omidyar Fellow Simon DeDeo likes to think of this as a form of “natural computation.”

At a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SFI External Professor Scott Page explored how the proliferation of data about our movements and preferences will have profound impacts on politics, marketing, infrastructure design, and many other spheres.

At a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SFI scientists described ways the latest research in complex systems might enhance the resilience and control of economic, social, and cyber systems.

At a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SFI External Professor Stephanie Forrest offered insights about cybersecurity, drawing inspiration from biology.

In a recent paper, two SFI researchers and their collaborators suggest ways some animals’ developmental responses to a warmer climate may inhibit their abilities to thrive.

SFI President Jerry Sabloff tells readers of the Santa Fe New Mexican what the Institute does, and why 2012 is a year for asking big questions at SFI.

From all of us in complexity science at the Santa Fe Institute, thank you for your support during 2011, and we wish you a happy and thoughtful 2012.

SFI has been awarded a major new grant from the John Templeton Foundation to pursue fundamental understandings of the hidden regularities in complex biological and social systems.

SFI Omidyar Fellow Simon DeDeo describes his interest in "natural computation" -- in particular whether researchers can describe and analyze conflicts in animal societies as a series of computations.

Is there a science of sustainability? A team led by SFI External Professor Luis Bettencourt has done the math and concluded that sustainability became a legitimate scientific field just over a decade ago, and the field continues to mature.

A study combining a new compilation of the fossil record with the most extensive molecular dataset to date pins the last common ancestor of all living animals to 800 million years ago and sheds new light on the Cambrian explosion.