News + Events

On June 19 at The Lensic Performing Arts Center, a panel of scientists will discuss the latest scientific understanding of time, and how time shapes our experience of life and mortality. The panel will be moderated by science writer Jennifer Ouellette, former editor of Gizmodo.

On June 11, the SFI Press released the second volume in its Seminar Series, The Emergence of Premodern States, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and Paula L.W. Sabloff. This project tackles one of the most deceptively simple inquiries in archaeology: How did humans transition from hunter-gatherer societies into states — collective entities that are the movers and shakers of the modern world?

This week at SFI, scientists from fields ranging from hydrology and environmental engineering to political science and economics explore the interplay of environmental conditions and society around water.

An SFI working group meets to sort through the many ways to think about cumulative cultural evolution.  

An SFI team led by Professor Mirta Galesic has received a nearly $500,000 grant from the US Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to study how people form beliefs about genetically modified crops.

External Professor Constantino Tsallis has been elected as a member of the Academia de Ciencias de America Latina

SFI Miller Scholar Laurence Gonzales has won the Eric Hoffer Book Award and Montaigne Medal for his bestseller Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why.

October 13-16, graduate students can meet with leading scientists to learn about modeling and evaluating the future of human populations and their environments. Free tuition for accepted students. Apply before July 11, 2018.

We humans make social judgments about ourselves and others that can appear contradictory. A new Social Sampling Model, presented by Professor Mirta Galesic and External Professor Henrik Olsson, suggest these apparently conflicting judgments can be explained by a single quantitative theory. 

Complexity scientists meet at SFI to examine how collective decisions get made in biological systems and to what degree those systems share a mechanism from one system to the next.

David Pines, a central figure in understanding the elemental properties of condensed matter and who played a major role in birthing complexity science and founding the Santa Fe Institute, passed away May 3, 2018.

SFI Trustee and writer Cormac McCarthy has been awarded the Humanities Prize by the School of Humanities and Education at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico. The prize recognizes McCarthy’s “deep and important contribution in the understanding of Mexico-USA relations through” his books like Blood Meridian and his Border trilogy.

A new proof by SFI Professor David Wolpert sends a humbling message to would-be super intelligences: you can’t know everything all the time.

Researchers analyzed new data on the Chilean elections of the 1970s to understand how economies react to institutional change.

SFI Science Board member Richard Lenski has been elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.

SFI External Professors Mahzarin Banaji and Pablo Marquet join the National Academy of Sciences.

"Algorithmic Information Dynamics: From Networks to Cells," is a new online course that will introduce students to tools that allow them to explore causal relationships in complex datasets. Register online through Complexity Explorer.

SFI hosts a three-day working group to explore the effect of increasing oxygen on the early evolution of animals.

SFI will be inaugurating a new annual tradition June 7-8 — the InterPlanetary Festival, which will render Santa Fe’s Railyard district a platform for imagining future human civilizations, on and beyond Earth.

May 4-5, 2018, SFI will host its annual Science Board Symposium and will focus on complex time, to kick off a new research program that seeks to understand time's passage.