News and events at the Santa Fe Institute
The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution is one of the most thoroughly-studied episodes in prehistory. But a new paper by Sam Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi shows that most explanations for it don’t agree with the evidence, and offers a new interpretation.
Jessica Flack presents an SFI Community Lecture on collective computation at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on October 22.
External Professor Raissa D’Souza has won the Network Science Society’s inaugural Euler award for her influential work in "the discovery and study of explosive percolation in networks and the insights it provided to explosive synchronization and network optimization.”
SFI External Professor W. Brian Arthur has been selected as a 2019 Citation Laureate by the Web of Science group “for research revealing network effects in economic systems that produce increasing returns."
A television production written and hosted by SFI Professor Cris Moore won a 2019 Rocky Mountain Emmy Award in the instructional/informational category.
For over a century, anthropologists have attempted to describe human societies as “matrilineal” or “patrilineal” — emphasizing relatedness among women or men, respectively. A new paper by Laura Fortunato, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, argues that it is time to confront the ambiguity at the heart of these terms.
SFI's free online course, Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos with College of the Atlantic professor David Feldman, begins Oct. 1. Topics to be covered include: phase space, bifurcations, chaos, the butterfly effect, strange attractors, and pattern formation.
On August 21-22, SFI celebrates Stuart Kauffman’s contributions to complex systems science in the workshop “Thirty Years of Complex Systems Thinking.” The two-day workshop covers new research linked to Kauffman’s adventurous career.
Enrollment is now open for SFI’s flagship online course, Introduction to Complexity. The course will begin on October 1.
A new paper exploring social perception biases finds that the greatest perception biases emerge when majority and minority groups are disproportionate in size, and when nodes of the same group are highly connected to each other.
SFI Science Board member Derek Smith has worked in academia, industry, and public health. He is using insights from his work at SFI to develop an evolution-inspired flu vaccine.
Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate who revealed symmetry and order in the world of subatomic particles and leveled his genius at complex mysteries of life and mind, died peacefully May 24, 2019. He was 89 years old.
The 2019 InterPlanetary Festival takes place June 14-16 in Santa Fe, NM.
Modular — or cliquey — group structure isolates the flow of communication between individuals, which might seem counterproductive to survival. But for some animal groups, more information isn't necessarily better, according to new SFI research published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
SFI's Sam Bowles, Mercedes Pascual, and Daniel Schrag have been elected as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Across the globe in a variety of societies, royal women found ways to advance the issues they cared about and advocate for the people important to them as detailed in a recent paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Research.
Physicists at the Santa Fe Institute and MIT have shown that Markov processes, widely used to model complex systems, must unfold over a larger space than previously assumed.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute and the Santa Fe Institute have developed a new model to explain the evolutionary origins of empathy and other related phenomena, such as emotional contagion and contagious yawning. The model suggests that the origin of a broad range of empathetic responses lies in cognitive simulation.
The Santa Fe Institute again has ranked among the world's top science and technology and transdisciplinary think tanks.
One of the first studies to examine how climate is influencing "functional traits" in forest communities on a global scale finds evidence of major changes.