The complex web of predator-prey relationships in the Adriatic Sea have shifted, suggesting human harvesting is taking a toll, according to research by SFI Professor Jennifer Dunne and colleagues. ... More
Research by SFI Professor Jennifer Dunne is the first to examine in detail the feeding habits of human hunter-gatherers in the food webs on which they depended. She is presenting her work Saturday at the AAAS meeting in Vancouver, BC. ... More
SFI Omidyar Fellow James O'Dwyer argues that mathematics, combined with an ecological way of thinking, can help humankind better understand diversity in both ecological and human settings. ... More
An article in The Daily Beast calls SFI "America's smartest lunch" and describes how the convergence of scientists, humanists, and other scholars fosters the Institute's signature freestyle forms of collaboration. ... More
In a video interview, SFI President Jerry Sabloff says the language of mathematics has made it possible for researchers from half a dozen fields to ask new questions about social complexity. ... More
The Institute has named two longtime SFI-affiliated researchers, Cris Moore and Luis Bettencourt, to its full-time resident faculty. ... More
The tension between contingency and the regularities that underlie historical processes is a key to understanding many complex systems. SFI's 2012 Bulletin, now online, explores the interplay of time and chance. ... More
Rather than improving at a (merely) exponential rate as some have theorized, information technology improves superexponentially -- which is to say, its progress accelerates -- according to SFI research. ... More
Two SFI researchers are among an international team of scientists asking how fast mammal species have grown since the dinosaurs, how fast some species have shrunk, and why. ... More
All living organisms collect information from their environments and use it to adapt. SFI Omidyar Fellow Simon DeDeo likes to think of this as a form of “natural computation.” ... More
At a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SFI scientists described ways the latest research in complex systems might enhance the resilience and control of economic, social, and cyber systems. ... More
At a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SFI External Professor Stephanie Forrest offered insights about cybersecurity, drawing inspiration from biology. ... More
At a session during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SFI External Professor W. Brian Arthur offered insights about the impact of technologies that have the ability to disrupt economic systems. ... More
In a recent paper, two SFI researchers and their collaborators suggest ways some animals’ developmental responses to a warmer climate may inhibit their abilities to thrive. ... More
Cities are open systems whose free-flow of people and ideas continually rejuvenates them, whereas corporations are closed systems that peak and die, according to an InformationWeek article that cites SFI's cities research. ... More
In a radio interview, SFI President Jerry Sabloff discusses SFI's signature style of scientific collaboration, and what scientists are learning about the evolution of intelligence, cities, and social complexity. ... More
In Urbanite Baltimore, SFI Professors Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt discuss their nascent theory of cities, indicators of urban health and ideas for improving it, and Baltimore’s place in the metropolitan spectrum. ... More
SFI President Jerry Sabloff tells readers of the Santa Fe New Mexican what the Institute does, and why 2012 is a year for asking big questions at SFI. ... More
SFI has been awarded a major new grant from the John Templeton Foundation to pursue fundamental understandings of the hidden regularities in complex biological and social systems. ... More
It's true that cities are magnets for crime, pollution, and disease. But they also are centers of innovation, economic growth, and efficiency, argue SFI's Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West in Scientific American. ... More
Is there a science of sustainability? A team led by SFI External Professor Luis Bettencourt has done the math and concluded that sustainability became a legitimate scientific field just over a decade ago, and the field continues to mature. ... More
A study combining a new compilation of the fossil record with the most extensive molecular dataset to date pins the last common ancestor of all living animals to 800 million years ago and sheds new light on the Cambrian explosion. ... More
The majority of the world's people now lives in cities, yet relatively little is known about urban systems, writes SFI External Professor Luis Bettencourt in a recent book review in Nature Geoscience. ... More
The growth of the global population beyond 7 billion means the pace of innovation must also continue to increase, said SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West at the recent Compass Summit conference. ... More
On the talk radio blog Conversation Crossroad, SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West discusses SFI's work to develop a unified theory of cities. ... More
Speciation and body size evolution operate independently in the mammalian family tree, conclude SFI External Professor Mark Pagel and his collaborators in Nature. This could explain dramatic size differences between closely related mammals. ... More
Evolutionary biologists at Stanford, including SFI Science Board co-chair Marcus Feldman, examined why most cultures have a class structure instead of being egalitarian, concluding that the very inequities of the class system may have been the driver for its global spread. ... More
At the Foundational Questions Institute’s recent conference on the nature of time, three SFI scientists offered perspectives from their respective fields. Watch their presentations here. ... More
A new book co-edited by SFI External Professor Stefan Thurner draws from math, physics, biochemistry, and cell biology to provide a comprehensive survey of today’s scientific understanding of evolution. ... More
On "Report from Santa Fe" with journalist Lorene Mills, SFI Professor Sam Bowles discusses economic inequality in America, the evolution of altruism in the human species, and his new book A Cooperative Species. ... More
SFI's David Krakauer has been named director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. SFI Professor Jessica Flack will co-direct the university's new Center for Complex Systems and Collective Computation. ... More
The Santa Fe Institute is seeking nominations and applications for resident faculty positions. ... More
All animals communicate, but of all the species on Earth, humans alone have language. SFI External Professor Mark Pagel asks why in a Santa Fe New Mexican article and in a TED Global 2011 video presentation. ... More
A new book by SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner examines four billion years of evolution for clues about the nature of evolutionary innovation. ... More
Physics treats sudden changes in complex chemical or physical systems as phase transitions. A new book examines phase transition phenomena in a broad range of complex systems, from ecology to society. ... More
Research by Tim Kohler and colleagues suggests that for the Prehispanic Pueblo Indians, political hierarchy could have emerged to develop and regulate public resources for a growing population. ... More
A healthy society keeps aggressive individuals in check, just as a healthy immune system controls infection. New research by SFI scientists reveals an efficient means of containing conflict at many levels, from cells to societies. ... More
Humanity’s greatest social innovation is the city, says The Atlantic. The article mentions SFI research that finds surprising statistical regularities among cities, patterns the researchers relate to an underlying "urban metabolism." Watch the video here. ... More
Aside from the usual Hollywood flourishes, the movie Contagion fairly accurately portrays some aspects of a viral outbreak, say two SFI scientists who have modeled the evolution and spread of pathogens. ... More
In three Community Lectures over three nights, SFI Professor David Krakauer explored extraordinarily convergent theories from math, physics, computation, and biology describing the emergence of intelligence on Earth. Watch or download the lectures here. ... More
Biologists and linguists have devised ways to measure evolution in genes and language. But changes in human culture are difficult to quantify. Scott Ortman thinks metaphor might be a cultural unit suitable for mathematical study. ... More
SFI has selected three eminent scholars as the first George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Chairs in Human Social Dynamics, to be referred to as the Cowan Professors: Robert Boyd, Ricardo Hausmann, and Mahzarin R. Banaji. ... More
In a short video profile of SFI's Omidyar Fellows, Simon DeDeo describes his research to better understand evolutionary processes through "computations" in nature. Watch it here. ... More
In a short video profile, SFI Omidyar Fellow Rogier Braakman describes his quest to reveal how chemistry evolved in the universe, from interstellar clouds to living organisms here on Earth. Watch it here. ... More
New research suggests that ideas from biology could be the key to quickly fixing problems in the large, highly co-evolved, and connected software systems we rely on in business, government, and academia. ... More
In a short video, SFI Omidyar Fellow Anne Kandler describes her research to model mathematically the decline of the Gaelic language of Scotland in search of insights about how endangered cultures might be preserved. Watch it here. ... More
A new blog by SFI External Professor Melanie Mitchell sorts the "fluff from the stuff" in complexity science. ... More
Scientific theories in both economics and biology assume that humans are inherently selfish. But a more optimistic view is gaining traction based on research by SFI Professor Sam Bowles and collaborators, says the Santa Fe New Mexican. ... More
Robert May, Baron May of Oxford and an SFI Science Board member, thinks there are about 8.74 million species on Earth, and he predicts an acceleration in the time it will take scientists to identify nearly all species. ... More
The future of human evolution is tied to the accelerating evolution of advancing technology, according to a National Public Radio article citing the work of SFI External Professor Brian Arthur. ... More
IBM -- drawing in part on the insights of SFI's cities and urbanization research team -- has introduced a simulator that models and analyzes complex data from seemingly disparate aspects of city life, and Portland, Oregon is the first customer. ... More
In an SFI Community Lecture, External Professor Jessica Green describes how she and other scientists are beginning to understand the ecologies of indoor environments. The research offers new insights about sustainability and human well being. Watch it here. ... More
Former SFI Omidyar Fellow Jessika Trancik has been awarded a PopTech Science and Public Leadership Fellowship for select “high- potential” scientists who work in “areas of critical importance to the nation and the planet.” ... More
SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West and collaborators have proposed a model that they say predicts maximum tree heights in different environments. ... More
Recent research conducted by SFI External Professors Andrew Dobson and Jim Brown in three California estuaries documents the surprisingly small number of parasites within the ecosystems, even though parasites represent at least half of all biodiversity. ... More
In his TED Global 2011 talk, SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West shows how the same mathematical framework used to measure growth and predict mortality in living organisms applies as well to cities. ... More
In an interview with Smartplanet.com, SFI postdoctoral fellow Hyejin Youn describes how social and economic data from cities around the world fit scaling patterns also found in biological organisms. ... More
In terms of individual smarts, ants are relatively inept, CBS News asserts, but collective intelligence counts for a lot, notes SFI's Deborah Gordon. ... More
Most cities, regardless of their size, have much more in common with each other than some rival townspeople would like to think, according to research by two SFI scientists described in a Sydney Morning Herald article. ... More
SFI Omidyar Fellow Simon DeDeo, in the Miller-McCune podcast “Curiouser and Curiouser,” describes SFI research that is revealing the hidden order behind conflict. Listen to the podcast here. ... More
Negative behavior spreads faster, but its proponents burn out sooner than more positive people, making society as a whole evolve toward positive interaction over time, suggests SFI External Professor Stefan Thurner in an MIT Technology Review article. ... More
While large companies are thought to promote wealth creation and economic growth, they often are actually dying and thus cannot, according to Christopher Whalen in a Reuters blog that cites the research of SFI scientists. ... More
In an SFI Community Lecture June 29 in Santa Fe, Iain Couzin, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, described how individual behavior produces group dynamics. Watch his lecture here. ... More
The time-honored eating habits of native Alaskans helped to stabilize the food webs they depended on, explains SFI Professor Jennifer Dunne in a recent interview on Santa Fe public radio. Listen to the interview here. ... More
Our genes may be programmed to save change for a rainy day. In a recent study in Nature, "cryptic variation" has been demonstrated in ribozymes by a team of ETH Zurich scientists, including SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner. ... More
A new exhibit covering the latest scientific theory about the origin of life on earth opens this Friday, July 1, at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science in Albuquerque. SFI scientists guided development of the exhibit's content. ... More
SFI Omidyar Fellow Laura Fortunato discusses her recent study of the ancient origins of monogamous marriage in the Miller-McCune podcast "Curiouser and Curiouser." Listen to the interview here. ... More
Hoping to shed more light on inherited traits – and potentially give scientists new tools to fight some genetic conditions – theorists at SFI want to develop improved models of mothers' and fathers' genes express in their children. ... More
America needs bold new thinking about growth and markets rather than simplistic retreads, according to a National Journal article that includes remarks from SFI's W. Brian Arthur about SFI's work. ... More
Video: In an SFI Community Lecture, MIT's Andrew Lo described how the same financial innovations that contributed to the global financial crisis might help solve societal ills. Watch it here. ... More
SFI External Professor Mark Pagel, a professor of biological sciences at Reading University (U.K.), has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society. ... More
It's no secret that the complexity of a technology influences how easy it will be to modify. A satellite simply has more parts than a toaster, and each of the satellite's parts depends more critically on all the other parts. ... More
X-Ray Earth, a new eries on the National Geographic Channel, is expected to re-air an episode featuring the urbanization work of SFI External Professor Luis Bettencourt and Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West on Wednesday, May 18, at 6:00 p.m MST. ... More
In a public radio interview, SFI Science Board member and External Professor Melanie Mitchell provides an overview of the sciences of complexity and suggests ways they might contribute to the betterment of the human condition. ... More
A new book by Nicholas de Monchaux, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), is the story of the A7L spacesuit worn on the surface of the moon -- 21 layers of redundant, interdependent complexity. ... More
In an interview with ACM's online magazine Ubiquity, SFI Science Board member Melanie Mitchell dispels a few myths and surveys the history, status, and promise of the sciences of complexity. Read the interview here. ... More
Several SFI scientists' papers appear in a special issue of Cliodynamics, a new journal covering research in the emerging, transdisciplinary field of theoretical and mathematical history. ... More
In a blog article about SFI's cities work, Forbes reporter Helen Coster talks with SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West about the special role slums play in the socioeconomic fabrics of today's cities. ... More
On NPR's Science Friday, author and SFI regular Cormac McCarthy trades quips with radio host Ira Flatow about the relationship between science and art. Listen to or read the interview here. ... More
In the Arizona Daily Star, SFI External Professor Brian Enquist describes recent work to discover what mathematical rules govern the size, shape, and other features of trees and plants. ... More
When mom’s and dad’s genes compete, whose alleles prevail to make their progeny tall or big boned -- and why -- is a matter of intense interest among evolutionary biologists. A recent SFI meeting on genomic imprinting reexamined current theory. ... More
The Templeton Foundation has awarded its $1.6 million annual prize to astrophysicist, former Royal Society President, and SFI Science Board member Sir Martin Rees. ... More
Omidyar Fellow Scott Ortman has received the Society for American Archaeology's 2011 Dissertation Award. He is one of two SFI people to receive awards during the Society's annual meeting in Sacremento, California. ... More
A front-page article describes SFI Omidyar Fellow Scott Ortman's view that the Tewa people who migrated to northern New Mexico 700 years ago from the Four Corners region sought a more egalitarian existence. ... More
In a PBS News Hour special report on the increasing economic hardship faced by many Americans, economist and SFI Professor Sam Bowles explains why inequalities passed from generation to generation through wealth inheritance are problematic. Watch the video here. ... More
A May 23-25 short course at the University of New Mexico, “Exploring Complexity in Science and Technology from a Santa Fe Institute Perspective,” introduces professionals from many backgrounds to the complex interactions that underlie social, biological, and computer behavior. ... More
A group of scientists explores the prospects for general, predictive theories in biology akin to those in the physical sciences, and suggests that such theories take inspiration not only from physics, but also from the information sciences. ... More
A new study by economist and SFI Professor Sam Bowles suggests that the agricultural revolution that saw the advent of farming and herding 12,000 years ago was, in fact, a step backward technologically. ... More
SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West spoke February 16 as part of The Economist magazine’s “Ideas Economy: Intelligent Infrastructure” event in New York City. Watch the video here. ... More
SFI Professor Jennifer Dunne responds to a Northwestern University study examining how perturbations propagate through a network of organisms, demonstrating that when an ecosystem is off-kilter, removing particular species can halt the cascade of destruction that may follow. ... More
A front-page article describes research by SFI Professor Jennifer Dunne and her collaborators to quantify the complex interactions among humans and other species in the food webs they are part of. ... More
On WNYC public radio, theoretical physicists and SFI researchers Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt discuss their attempts to come up with the universal laws and constants governing all cities and city life everywhere. Listen to their interview. ... More
SFI External Professor Luis Bettencourt describes how researchers are quantifying what is remarkable about cities by adjusting for their size. The piece is the first in a series of monthly op-eds by SFI scientists in the Santa Fe New Mexican. ... More
In an online radio interview, SFI Science Board member Deborah Gordon discusses her work monitoring the movements of individual ants within colonies and describes what she has learned from them about the evolution of complex systems. Listen to her interview. ... More
The New York Times magazine features SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West and his search for, with External Professor Luis Bettencourt, the "short list" of hidden laws underlying the seeming chaos of cities. ... More
Think New York is an exceptional city? It’s not. In a paper in PLoS One, two SFI researchers propose ditching traditional per capita comparisons in favor of more scientific measures that take into account the natural advantages of larger cities. ... More
Thomas Malthus’s concern over the differential between the growth of populations and the growth of the resources to support them underlies both Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and much of traditional economics. But Malthus was wrong, at least over the long term. Contrary to the predictions of the logistic growth model of Pearl and Reed in 1920, the population of the US did not top out at 197 million and has just reached 300 million. Economists have extensively addressed the issue of creation of wealth, most recently through the development of endogenous growth theory, and a clear conclusion of this work is the pivotal role played by innovations in ideas, physical technology and social institutions. Similarly in natural systems, Malthus was undoubtedly correct over the short term, but over the long-term, evolutionary innovations have proven sufficient to steadily expand the planet’s carrying capacity. Innovation is consequently of substantial theoretical and practical concern. Research at SFI on innovation focuses on evolutionary processes in biological, technological, and market systems.
External Professor
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Intelligent Systems Lab
External Professor
Professor , George Mason University, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, Department of Computational Social Science
External Professor
Leader of Max Planck Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences
External Professor
Professor, University of Washington, Dept. of Biology
Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Scientist IV, Los Alamos National Laboratory, T-8
Omidyar Fellow
Assistant Professor, University of Colorado, Boulder, Computer Science
External Professor
Director, Complexity Sciences Center, Professor of Physics, University of California, Davis, Complexity Sciences Center and Physics
External Professor
Senior Fellow, Woods Institute, Roger and Cynthia Lang Professor in Environmental Anthropology, Stanford University, Anthropology
External Professor
Professor, Princeton University, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Co-Director, Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab
Chair of Faculty and Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Senior Scientist and Curator of Paleobiology, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Paleobiology
Science Board Co-Chair, External Professor
Wohlford Professor, Stanford University, Biological Sciences
External Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Co-Director, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Center for Complex Systems Analysis and Collective Computation
Science Board, External Professor
Professor of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Systems Biology
External Professor
Associate Professor, University of Oregon Eugene, Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
External Professor
Professor, University of Delhi, Department of Physics and Astrophysics
External Professor
Professor, University of Tokyo, Department of Pure and Applied Sciences
Science Board
Professor, University of California-Berkeley, Dept. of Integrative Biology
External Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Director, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin Institute for Discovery
External Professor
Professor, University of Arizona, Anthropology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Science Board
Hannah Distinguished Professor and Director, Ecol, Evol Bio & Behavior, Michigan State University, Ecology Evolutionary Biology & Behavior
Science Board
Moffett Professor of Biology, Princeton University, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Science Board, External Professor
Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
External Professor
Professor, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Ecology
Science Board, External Professor
Professor and Director , University of Texas at Austin, Section of Integrative Biology and Division of Statistics and Scientific Computation
External Professor
Professor of Economics and Social Sciences; Head, Carnegie Mellon University, Social and Decision Sciences
External Professor
Professor, Reading University, School of Biological Sciences
External Professor
National Cancer Institute, Division of Cancer Prevention
External Professor
Assistant Professor, UCLA School of Medicine, Department of Systems Biology
External Professor
Professor emeritus, University of Vienna, Theoretical Chemistry
External Professor
Professor, University of Leipzig, Dept. of Computer Science & Interdisciplinary Center of Bioinformatics
Science Board, External Professor
Professor and Vincent J. Coates Chair in Molecular Neurobiology, The Salk Institute, Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory
External Professor
Head of Complex Systems Research Group, Medical University of Vienna
Omidyar Fellow
Assistant Professor of Engineering Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Science Board, Science Steering Committee
Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe Institute
External Professor
Professor Emeritus, Anthropology, University of California-Irvine, Institute of Mathematical Behavioral Science
Science Board, External Professor
Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Near Eastern Archaeology, University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology and Museum of Anthropology
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