News + Events

Charles Stevens, a preeminent neurobiologist who revealed fundamental architectures in the brain and whose experimental techniques paved the way for decades of molecular neuroscience, passed away on October 21, 2022, in San Diego, CA. At the time of his passing Stevens, 88, was a distinguished professor emeritus at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and a fellow of the Santa Fe Institute’s Science Board and External Faculty.

In anticipation of Cormac McCarthy’s newest books, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” (Knopf, 2022), former SFI Miller Scholar Laurence Gonzales recollects McCarthy’s long and ongoing friendship with SFI.

In a new study, published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, SFI's Simon DeDeo and Helena Miton describe a new model for understanding the transmission of tacit knowledge – that kind of working knowledge that is passed down with very limited specification. 

SFI External Professor Lauren Ancel Meyers will lead a new interdisciplinary Center for Pandemic Decision Science at the University of Texas at Austin, funded by a pilot grant from the National Science Foundation.

How do the regulatory systems of governments change as they grow? Do bigger governments require more or fewer bureaucrats per capita? Are more efficient bureaucracies possible? Program Postdoctoral Fellow James Holehouse is fascinated by how complex systems, from governments to cells, change over time. 

Research jams are among the highlights of the biannual JSMF–SFI Postdocs in Complexity Conference. This fall, two micro-working groups met in the week leading up to the conference to make progress on conversations they began at the meeting last spring. 

The October 13–14 workshop "Coding the Past: The Challenges and Promise of Large-Scale Cultural Databases" meets to train a group of researchers to use the new online Database of Religious History.

At the crossroads of computer science and computational science, the emerging field of scientific machine learning focuses on harnessing new ideas in machine learning together with predictive physics-based models to solve complex, real-world problems. On October 10–12, a group met to collaborate on new ideas about using scientific machine learning in complex fields.

In biology, hierarchies are everywhere, from Linnaean taxonomy — the system we use to classify living things — to the social organization within a pod of gorillas. Biological hierarchies are often explained by the Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET) framework, which holds that evolutionary processes gave rise to life’s hierarchies. But this framework has some missing pieces, Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Pedro Márquez-Zacarías suggests.

Novelist Tom McCarthy has been named a Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute for 2022–2025.

SFI Professor Sam Bowles and External Professor Herb Gintis have been selected as 2022 Citation Laureates by Clarivate "for providing evidence and models that broaden our understanding of economic behavior to include not only self-interest but also reciprocity, altruism, and other forms of social cooperation.”

Microeconomics: Competition, Conflict, and Coordination, a new textbook by SFI Professor Samuel Bowles and Simon Halliday, upends the conventional content of economics texts and allows a new, more engaging, way of teaching the subject.

SFI welcomes Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Daniel Muratore, whose research focuses on multiple aspects of the knowledge-generating process from theory and simulation to data analysis to classical oceanographic fieldwork.

In late May, SFI's postdocs gathered for 72 Hours of Science — two nights and three days of collaborative, generative science — to see how far they could develop a research question in a limited time. 

SFI welcomes new Program Postdoctoral Fellow Arseny Moskvichev, who is fascinated by how people use language and abstraction to communicate and share knowledge.

SFI welcomes Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kelle Dhein, who hopes to shed new light on the debate about what information is by exploring how particular concepts of information influence present-day research in the behavioral sciences.

The climate and biodiversity crises are stressing wildlife species around the world in unprecedented ways. A species’ evolutionary past, however, can help shed light on its fate in the face of future environmental change. Helping to fill in these crucial data gaps is the focus of Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Jack Shaw’s work at SFI. 

In a new paper, SFI Complexity Fellow Stefani Crabtree and Jennifer Dunne, SFI’s Vice President for Science, lay out the first comprehensive definition of archaeoecology, an emerging field that can fill a knowledge gap about important questions of how humans and nature interacted and shaped each other across different places and through time. 

Many researchers at SFI are driven by a curiosity to understand the laws that underlie various forms of life. Work spearheaded more than two decades ago by SFI’s Geoffrey West, Brian Enquist, and Jim Brown has illustrated that organisms’ biological functions are governed by scaling laws. Other researchers have gone on to discover that human social life, from cities to organizations, follows similar rules. “These laws apply, with their own specificities, across domains,” says Veronica Cappelli, an SFI Applied Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow.

A new kind of predictive network model could help determine which people will change their minds about contentious scientific issues when presented with evidence-based information. A new study in Science Advances presents a framework to accurately predict whether a person will change their opinion about a certain topic. The approach estimates the amount of dissonance, or mental discomfort, a person has from holding conflicting beliefs about a topic.