News + Events

This spring, the Santa Fe Institute’s Board of Trustees elected Ian McKinnon and Sam Peters as Board Chair and Vice-Chair, respectively. McKinnon and Peters, who both grew up in New Mexico, have multi-decadal relationships with SFI. Their three-year appointments began on April 29, 2025, following the Board’s bi-annual meeting.

Last month, a workshop on the Science of History met to explore a series of provocative questions: How do laws and regularities in a domain like physics differ from those in human history? How might history be an evolutionary science? How does causation work in history? And finally, is it possible to define progress in human culture?

Economic inequality is one of our primary global challenges and is a key research topic for archaeology — Why do some societies become deeply unequal while others remain more balanced? What clues about our economic past are hidden in the ruins of ancient homes? A new Special Feature in PNAS, edited by SFI External Professors Tim Kohler (Washington State University), Amy Bogaard (University of Oxford), and facilitated by Scott Ortman (University of Colorado Boulder), highlights papers by archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and economists exploring these questions using a global database of over 53,000 residential buildings from about 4,000 archaeological settlements.

As artificial intelligence has become a regular part of our daily lives, companies have run into a serious problem: their longstanding tools for measuring AI performance and safety no longer suffice. Last March, SFI hosted an Applied Complexity studio to find better ways to measure success, impact, and safety in generative AI models that interact with the world. 

A new edited volume published this past April explores SFI Miller Scholar Ted Chiang’s science fiction through a philosophical lens. The book is a rare addition to the subgenre, writes SFI Research Fellow Anthony Eagan in a review, in part because Chiang's work is profound across many areas of philosophical inquiry, including questions concerning the nature of time, human consciousness, language, identity, and agency.

SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Anna Clemencia Guerrero has received a Whitman Center Fellowship from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The fellowship, awarded to 24 researchers from around the world, brings exceptional scientists to MBL for up to 10 weeks of collaboration and access to specialized equipment to pursue projects in biology and ecology.

Traditional models of how culture spreads were designed to describe early civilizations, typically focused on hunter-gatherers and almost always on pre-industrial societies. Today, a myriad of factors — from the internet to our highly diverse societies to astonishing levels of inequality — shape the way cultural norms are transmitted. The old models of cultural evolution simply don’t describe today’s societies. To begin building an updated framework of modern-day cultural transmission, representatives from fields including anthropology, sociology, economics, and cognitive science gathered at SFI from May 14–16 for a working group called “Building a Science of Cultural Evolution for the 21^st Century.”

SFI External Professor Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University) has received a BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Science. She shares the award with social psychologists Icek Ajzen, Dolores Albarracín, Anthony Greenwald and Richard Petty for “revolutionizing the way we understand and measure attitudes" with an influence that extends to “psychology, sociology, political science, education, health, economics, and other areas.”

A recent study by SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Andrew Stier and Professor Brandon Ogbunu in NPJ Complexity shows that many U.S. cities diverge from common narratives about political leanings and implicit bias.

Music is a universal language across time, peoples, and geographies, and also fundamental to our human experience, a result of our biological evolution. Despite musicality’s connection to both culture and biology, studies on the evolution of music have rarely brought these topics together. A May 28-30 working group is convening to begin bridging that gap.

In a recent analysis, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Yuanzhao Zhang and collaborator William Gilpin reported that one foundation model called Chronos could generate predictions of chaotic dynamical systems at least as accurately as models trained on relevant data. The team presented their work at the Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, saying the paper represents the first test of zero-shot learning in forecasting chaotic systems.

SFI postdoctoral fellow Kaleda Denton has been recognized by the European Society for Evolutionary Biology as the runner-up for the 2025 John Maynard Smith Prize for outstanding young biologists.

SFI Life Trustee and Chairman Emeritus Bill Miller has been elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society. Miller is one of 38 new members elected into the APS this year and is recognized in the category of “the arts, professions, and leaders and public and private affairs.”

SFI External Professor Mason Porter (UCLA) has been named a Fellow of the Network Science Society, an organization that supports an interdisciplinary research community that is dedicated to investigating the phenomena, modeling, and behavior of networks.

Five millennia ago, wealth inequality — which had stayed roughly constant for thousands of years — exploded. It has stayed constant, albeit much higher, ever since. One factor was the ox-drawn plow, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Economic Literature. 

Collective action can be highly effective within a community, but can be harder to achieve across communities. People who have friends across communities could help tackle this challenge, finds a recent study in Conservation Letters, in which SFI External Professor Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and colleagues surveyed residents across 28 Tanzanian fishing villages about participation in beach management activities.

SFI External Professors Alison Gopnik and Scott Page are among 120 new members of the National Academy of Sciences, announced this week. Election to NAS recognizes the members’ “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.”

Humans learn by breaking through and plateauing, persisting and resting, and, occasionally, experiencing the blissful flow state. Mastering a skill can take decades, but the learning process unfolds across multiple timescales, from mere moments to days. A new study presents a unified theoretical model, capturing the different timescales of learning.

In April, SFI opened the doors to its newest building, constructed at the Miller Campus in Tesuque. With floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors and a covered portal overlooking the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the Gurley Forum will both support existing activities and enable experiments in new modes of doing science. Its first meeting was the 2025 Complexity Science Symposium, held April 25-26, beginning a series of larger science events that haven’t previously been possible on SFI’s campuses.

All organisms carry their parents in their DNA. But it’s become clear that offspring inherit information from many other places, too. Mammals inherit gut microbiomes while in utero, and antibodies through breast milk. Birds, reptiles, and fish inherit environmental information about the particular place they hatch. An SFI working group explores what other forms of non-genetic information show up in biology, why they aren't as salient as genetics, and what can they teach about the way living things cope with uncertain environments.