News + Events

A June 13-15 workshop met to explore optimal regulations in diverse fields, ranging from biology and physics to corporate management.

Cormac McCarthy, a trustee of the Santa Fe Institute and one of the greatest American novelists, passed away on Tuesday, June 12, at his home in Santa Fe. He was 89 years old.

SFI External Professor France Córdova received an honorary doctorate from Yale University during its 2023 commencement ceremony in May. Granted the degree of Doctor of Science, Córdova was one of nine honorary graduates.

SFI Fractal Faculty member Kyle Harper, who joined SFI in August 2022, takes an unconventional approach to his studies of Roman history at the University of Oklahoma. With a long-held interest in physics, Harper brings a complex-systems lens to the study of the human past as he explores the rise of technologies, environmental change and constraints, and the spread of diseases. In July 2022, Harper sat down to talk with SFI President David Krakauer about his work. Here are clips from their conversation.

In a new study published in PNAS, External Professor and UC Davis professor emeritus Alan Hastings and colleagues analyzed a case of social contagion in Adouin's gulls in Spain.

SFI's David Wolpert's No-free-lunch theorems have stirred up many opinions over the past few decades. Wolpert chimes in on the conversation in a new piece in the Journal for General Philosophy of Science.

James Hartle, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, passed away on May 17 in Switzerland at the age of 83. A longtime familiar face at SFI, Jim offered profound insights into conversations in a characteristically gentle manner. He will be missed immensely.

Registration for virtual participation in SFI’s three-day Collective Intelligence Symposium & Short Course (CISSC) is now open. With a sold-out in-person event, organizers are offering live streaming and virtual access to posters for remote participants. The $100 online-only registration fee also provides lifetime access to video recordings of the meeting. Seats via Zoom are limited. Interested participants are encouraged to register soon. 

A new study in Science Advances proposes a model for examining the interplay of epidemiology and economics that could give policymakers guidelines when we face novel outbreaks in the future.

Is human reproduction exceptionally egalitarian compared to other mammals, or do we have high "reproductive skew"? It's a question that a team of more than 100 researchers tackled in a recent paper published in PNAS. Their finding? “Human exceptionalism has been greatly exaggerated,” says SFI External Professor Monique Borgerhoff Mulder (UC Davis).

James Pelkey, former member of the SFI Board of Trustees, passed away on February 16, 2023, at the age of 77 in Maui, Hawaii. A committed supporter of the research carried out at SFI, Pelkey served on SFI’s Board of Trustees for a decade, and became the Chair of the Board from 1990-1992.

For the past 14 years, SFI has played an important role at pivotal moments in Milena Tsvetkova's career, including her recent four-month sabbatical. 

SFI Science Board member and External Professor Lauren Ancel Meyers and colleagues organized a May 17-18 workshop to reimagine how pandemic simulation games can help us prepare for the superbugs of the future, bringing together epidemiologists; military war game specialists; officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and experts in human behavior, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. 

AI and the Barrier of Meaning 2, a workshop held at the Santa Fe Institute on April 24–26, brought together experts working in AI, cognitive science, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, neuroscience, and law. Videos of the talks from the workshop are now available on YouTube. Similar to the first AI and the Barrier of Meaning workshop, held in 2018, the event focused on questions related to “understanding” and what it means to “extract meaning” in a humanlike way.

A March 15 paper in Cell Reports Physical Science co-authored by External Professor Jessika Trancik (MIT) offers strategies to make electric-vehicle charging beneficial to the power grid.

In a paper in Scientific Reports, former SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Gizem Bacaksizlar Turbic and SFI Professor Mirta Galesic tested compared the network structure of comments in four publications with varying political persuasions to test theories about the potential influence of a small group of voices. 

Information architectures — the rules and norms that govern the spread of information — likely serve a dominant force in shaping society. A May 9–11 workshop met to explore a host of emerging questions around information architectures and their impact on our lives.

Curiosity is far more than a single-minded pursuit of knowledge or understanding, argue SFI External Professor Dani Bassett (University of Pennsylvania) and Perry Zurn (American University) in their new book, Curious Minds: The Power of Connection. Rather, curiosity is the product of networks, connecting the dots in unexpected ways. 

Human innovations often arise "ahead of their time," but evolution, we’re told, innovates only in response to environmental conditions. In his new book, Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture, SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner urges us to consider another possibility. “What if,” he asks, “many innovations arise before their time,” in nature just as in human culture? 

In a new paper in PNAS, Eric Libby, Christopher Kempes, and Jordan Okie take a quantitative approach to begin tackling one of the great mysteries of biology: how eukaryotes arose.