D. Eric Smith

Eric Smith is a Principal Investigator (Specially Appointed Professor) at the Earth-Life Science Institute in Toyko. He likes to study phenomena whose emergence and evolution result from the intersection of large-numbers statistics with richly structured state spaces and the asymmetry between past and future.  

He has sought to understand the origin of life as a planetary process, particularly the interplay of chance and necessity that generated the systems of metabolism, the rise of molecular hierarchy and folded macromolecules, and the choreography that coalesces objects and events into individuals and their reproductive lifecycles. He pursues similar interests in economics, particularly the operation of self-generated institutional and game-theoretic frameworks in economies that never settle down and that operate within polities and ecospheres with their own structures and constraints, and in human language at the interface of cognitive science and population history.

A common thread in these and other interest areas is causation that arises jointly from mechanistic structure and the dynamics of probabilities.  Equally central to his work style and interests, however, is a goal of coming to know each phenomenon as its own element of the world, revealing some dimension of the possibility for order not available to us to discover and experience in quite the same way in anything else.