Simon Levin on 'Evolving an Ecological Perspective'

What does ecological thinking look like? For SFI Science Board Member Simon A. Levin, adopting an ecological perspective involves thinking about the interplay between interdependence and adaptation. His op-ed appears in the Winter 2020 issue of The Bridge.

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Susan Fitzpatrick on 'Complexity Blind Spots'

In the latest issue of The Bridge, SFI Science Board member Susan Fitzpatrick describes how efficiency can lead to fragility, and advocates for using complex systems thinking to inform our engineered social systems.

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Dan Rockmore: 'Three mathematicians we lost in 2020'

When a great mathematician dies, we lose direct access to a rare and brilliant mind. In 2020, three great mathematicians died: John Conway, Ronald Graham, and Freeman Dyson. In a beautiful memorial published in The New Yorker, SFI External Professor Dan Rockmore helps us recollect the wonders of each man’s singular genius.

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Jennifer Dunne reflects on a year without ‘superpowers’

The Santa Fe Institute has always been defined by its ability to bring diverse, leading thinkers into the same room to tackle important research questions. So for SFI, 2020 has been something like stepping into that red chamber in the Fortress of Solitude. Jennifer Dunne, SFI’s Vice President for Science, jokes that the pandemic, with its necessary restrictions on in-person gatherings, “took away our superpower.” In this Q&A, Dunne talks about which aspects of SFI science can and cannot be replicated in a virtual environment, and what this means going into 2021.

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Nautilus: Playing Go with Darwin

In a new op-ed at Nautilus, SFI President David Krakauer explains that the key moves in evolution bear a striking resemblance to those that animate the game of Go.

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Aeon: All stars

In their recent essay in Aeon, SFI Professor Jessica Flack and collaborator Cade Massey (Wharton School, University of Texas) argue that complexity science can help us improve our strategies for building teams.

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Nautilus: A Model for a Just COVID-19 Vaccination Program

In their op-ed for Nautilus, SFI External Professor Melanie Moses (University of New Mexico) and her colleague Kathy L. Powers (University of New Mexico), argue that if scientists are to help public health policymakers meet their stated goal of protecting the most vulnerable, they must refine their methods to focus on the complex systems that govern communities that are most at risk.

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The Conversation: Election polls are more accurate if they ask participants how others will vote

In a post-election op-ed for The Conversation, SFI Professor Mirta Galesic and Wändi Bruine de Bruin at USC Dornsife describe their polling research with colleagues Henrik Olssen, SFI External Professor, and Drazen Prelec at MIT. The team found that if polls start to ask questions about how people think members of their social circle or state will vote, they tend to predict results with far greater accuracy. 

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First to forecast life above Venus

September 2020 brought a landmark discovery for astrobiology — the detection of a chemical compound in the clouds of Venus that is often associated with the presence of life. Though no SFI researchers were on the team that published the recent discovery of phosphine, one SFI scientist first forecast the possibility of Venusian life more than 50 years earlier.

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Aeon: Uncertain times

In an essay for Aeon magazine, SFI Professor Jessica Flack and SFI Davis Professor Melanie Mitchell describe how the COVID-19 pandemic prompts us to revisit the ways that complex systems retain stability in the biological world. By learning from biological systems, we can begin to shore up the vulnerability inherent in the complex systems that undergird human life.

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Nautilus: 'The Damage We're Not Attending To'

The COVID-19 pandemic can be understood as the first complexity crisis in history, Geoffrey West and David Krakauer write in an article for Nautilus. By capturing the kinds of tradeoffs that lie at the heart of complexity crises, complexity science can help us manage the pandemic’s long-term ramifications.

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