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. ... More
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. ... More
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. ... More
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. ... More
New research by Erol Akçay (Princeton) and SFI Omidyar Fellow Jeremy Van Cleve demonstrates the crucial role flexible behaviors might play in the evolution of high levels of group cooperation. ... More
SFI has named evolutionary anthropologist Paul Hooper as a new Omidyar Fellow for 2012. ... More
By turning HIV’s chief weapon, its rapid evolution, against itself, SFI External Professor Bette Korber and her team may have created a vaccine that can teach the immune system to recognize many different forms of the virus. ... More
A recent working group at SFI explored the cultural processes that give rise to social monogamy and examined a number of different explanations for its persistence in many human societies. ... More
Cities are a source of many of the world's most pressing problems. But urbanization might also offer their solutions, according to SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West in an online video. ... More
SFI Omidyar Fellow James O'Dwyer argues that mathematics, combined with an ecological way of thinking, can help humankind better understand diversity in both ecological and human settings. ... More
An article in The Daily Beast calls SFI "America's smartest lunch" and describes how the convergence of scientists, humanists, and other scholars fosters the Institute's signature freestyle forms of collaboration. ... More
In a video interview, SFI President Jerry Sabloff says the language of mathematics has made it possible for researchers from half a dozen fields to ask new questions about social complexity. ... More
The Institute has named two longtime SFI-affiliated researchers, Cris Moore and Luis Bettencourt, to its full-time resident faculty. ... More
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. ... More
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. ... More
Two SFI researchers are among an international team of scientists asking how fast mammal species have grown since the dinosaurs, how fast some species have shrunk, and why. ... More
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.” ... More
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. ... More
At a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SFI External Professor Stephanie Forrest offered insights about cybersecurity, drawing inspiration from biology. ... More
At a session during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SFI External Professor W. Brian Arthur offered insights about the impact of technologies that have the ability to disrupt economic systems. ... More
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. ... More
SFI External Professors Herbert Gintis and Jessica Flack weigh in on the challenges of understanding self-regarding versus cooperative behavior. ... More
Cities are open systems whose free-flow of people and ideas continually rejuvenates them, whereas corporations are closed systems that peak and die, according to an InformationWeek article that cites SFI's cities research. ... More
By constructing models of the microbial communities inside the human digestive system, a team led by SFI External Professor Elhanan Borenstein has revealed key differences between the microbial network interactions in the guts of lean and obese people. ... More
In a radio interview, SFI President Jerry Sabloff discusses SFI's signature style of scientific collaboration, and what scientists are learning about the evolution of intelligence, cities, and social complexity. ... More
In Urbanite Baltimore, SFI Professors Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt discuss their nascent theory of cities, indicators of urban health and ideas for improving it, and Baltimore’s place in the metropolitan spectrum. ... More
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. ... More
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. ... More
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. ... More
It's true that cities are magnets for crime, pollution, and disease. But they also are centers of innovation, economic growth, and efficiency, argue SFI's Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West in Scientific American. ... More
A study co-authored by SFI Faculty Chair Doug Erwin offers new details about the "great dying" 252 million years ago, during which three-quarters of the life on Earth perished. ... More
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. ... More
The majority of the world's people now lives in cities, yet relatively little is known about urban systems, writes SFI External Professor Luis Bettencourt in a recent book review in Nature Geoscience. ... More
The growth of the global population beyond 7 billion means the pace of innovation must also continue to increase, said SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West at the recent Compass Summit conference. ... More
Modeling by SFI Science Board member Simon Levin and collaborators explores how forests and savannas maintain a balance at the boundaries between the two. ... More
On the talk radio blog Conversation Crossroad, SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West discusses SFI's work to develop a unified theory of cities. ... More
Speciation and body size evolution operate independently in the mammalian family tree, conclude SFI External Professor Mark Pagel and his collaborators in Nature. This could explain dramatic size differences between closely related mammals. ... More
In an interview on MIT's Cambridge Nights program, SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West discusses the implications of metabolic rate scaling with species size. ... More
Evolutionary biologists at Stanford, including SFI Science Board co-chair Marcus Feldman, examined why most cultures have a class structure instead of being egalitarian, concluding that the very inequities of the class system may have been the driver for its global spread. ... More
SFI's Chris Wood asks what the evolved brain has that modern computers don't, and suggests that having a more comprehensive understanding of the brain would allow us to apply new computational approaches to problem solving. ... More
SFI Science Board member Richard Lenski has been studying the evolution of 12 strains of E. coli since 1988, more than 50,000 generations, an example of the value of long-term datasets, according to Wired. ... More
The proto-language from which most modern languages descended likely featured a sentence structure in which the verb came last, say SFI's Murray Gell-Mann and Stanford's Merritt Ruhlen. ... More
At the Foundational Questions Institute’s recent conference on the nature of time, three SFI scientists offered perspectives from their respective fields. Watch their presentations here. ... More
A new book co-edited by SFI External Professor Stefan Thurner draws from math, physics, biochemistry, and cell biology to provide a comprehensive survey of today’s scientific understanding of evolution. ... More
On "Report from Santa Fe" with journalist Lorene Mills, SFI Professor Sam Bowles discusses economic inequality in America, the evolution of altruism in the human species, and his new book A Cooperative Species. ... More
SFI's David Krakauer has been named director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. SFI Professor Jessica Flack will co-direct the university's new Center for Complex Systems and Collective Computation. ... More
The Santa Fe Institute is seeking nominations and applications for resident faculty positions. ... More
All animals communicate, but of all the species on Earth, humans alone have language. SFI External Professor Mark Pagel asks why in a Santa Fe New Mexican article and in a TED Global 2011 video presentation. ... More
A new book by SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner examines four billion years of evolution for clues about the nature of evolutionary innovation. ... More
Physics treats sudden changes in complex chemical or physical systems as phase transitions. A new book examines phase transition phenomena in a broad range of complex systems, from ecology to society. ... More
A healthy society keeps aggressive individuals in check, just as a healthy immune system controls infection. New research by SFI scientists reveals an efficient means of containing conflict at many levels, from cells to societies. ... More
Humanity’s greatest social innovation is the city, says The Atlantic. The article mentions SFI research that finds surprising statistical regularities among cities, patterns the researchers relate to an underlying "urban metabolism." Watch the video here. ... More
In three Community Lectures over three nights, SFI Professor David Krakauer explored extraordinarily convergent theories from math, physics, computation, and biology describing the emergence of intelligence on Earth. Watch or download the lectures here. ... More
In a short video profile, SFI Omidyar Fellow Rogier Braakman describes his quest to reveal how chemistry evolved in the universe, from interstellar clouds to living organisms here on Earth. Watch it here. ... More
In a short video, SFI Omidyar Fellow Anne Kandler describes her research to model mathematically the decline of the Gaelic language of Scotland in search of insights about how endangered cultures might be preserved. Watch it here. ... More
A new blog by SFI External Professor Melanie Mitchell sorts the "fluff from the stuff" in complexity science. ... More
How did life emerge from early earth’s primitive geochemistry? What can computerized approximations of life tell us about the evolution of real-life processes such as metabolism, reproduction, and mutation? Can understanding the principles that underlie how ecosystems form, become stable, and change help us measure and respond to ecological threat? What norms have emerged that make human societies more stable? Will a better understanding of the eternal dance of viral mutation and human immune response teach us to beat HIV and other pathogens? SFI’s research of complex living systems incorporates theoretical inquiry, modeling, and empirical study.
External Professor
Leader of Max Planck Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences
External Professor
Professor, University of Washington, Dept. of Biology
Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Scientist IV, Los Alamos National Laboratory, T-8
Omidyar Fellow
Assistant Professor, Harvard University, School of Public Health
Omidyar Fellow
Assistant Professor, University of Colorado, Boulder, Computer Science
External Professor
Director, Complexity Sciences Center, Professor of Physics, University of California, Davis, Complexity Sciences Center and Physics
External Professor
Senior Fellow, Woods Institute, Roger and Cynthia Lang Professor in Environmental Anthropology, Stanford University, Anthropology
External Professor
Professor, Utrecht University, Theoretical Biology & Bioinformatics
External Professor
Professor, Princeton University, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Co-Director, Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab
External Professor
CSIC Professor, Instituto de Biología Molecular y Celular de Plantas, Evolutionary Systems Virology Group
External Professor
Associate Professor, University of Arizona, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Chair of Faculty and Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Senior Scientist and Curator of Paleobiology, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Paleobiology
Science Board, External Professor
Evan Pugh Professor; Distinguished Visiting Professor, Penn State Universityp; King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences
Science Board Co-Chair, External Professor
Wohlford Professor, Stanford University, Biological Sciences
External Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Co-Director, Center for Complexity and Collectiive Computation, Wisconsin Institute of Discovery, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Science Board, External Professor
Professor of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Systems Biology
External Professor
Associate Professor, University of Oregon Eugene, Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
External Professor
Professor, University of Delhi, Department of Physics and Astrophysics
Science Board
Professor, University of California-Berkeley, Dept. of Integrative Biology
External Professor
Laboratory Fellow, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Theoretical Biology and Biophysics
External Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Director, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin Institute for Discovery
External Professor
Professor, University of Arizona, Anthropology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Science Board
Moffett Professor of Biology, Princeton University, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
External Professor
Professor, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Ecology
Science Board, External Professor
Professor and Director , University of Texas at Austin, Section of Integrative Biology and Division of Statistics and Scientific Computation
Science Board Chair, Emeritus, Santa Fe Institute
Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Biology and Natural Philosophy, George Mason University, Krasnow Institute
External Professor
IXXI-Complex Systems Institute-LIP-Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Computer Science
External Professor
Professor, Reading University, School of Biological Sciences
External Professor
Rosemary Grant Collegiate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Science Board, External Professor
Senior Fellow, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Mathematical and Theoretical Biology
External Professor
Professor, Stanford University, School of Education
External Professor
Professor, Research Director and Center Leader, University of Southern Denmark, Self Organizing Systems
External Professor
Assistant Professor, UCLA School of Medicine, Department of Systems Biology
Science Board, External Professor
Professor, Earth and Planetary Sciences; Director, Center for the Environment, Harvard University, Laboratory for Geochemical Oceanography
External Professor
Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, Statistics Department
External Professor
Professor, University of Leipzig, Dept. of Computer Science & Interdisciplinary Center of Bioinformatics
Science Board, External Professor
Professor and Vincent J. Coates Chair in Molecular Neurobiology, The Salk Institute, Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory
Omidyar Fellow
Assistant Professor of Engineering Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
External Professor
Professor, Dean, Arizona State University, School of Sustainability
External Professor
Professor, University of Zurich, Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environ. Studies
Science Board, Science Steering Committee
Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe Institute
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