News + Events

Polygyny has been more common among relatively egalitarian low-tech horticulturalists than in highly unequal, capital-intensive agricultural societies. This surprising fact is known as the "polygyny paradox," and a new study from SFI's Dynamics of Wealth Inequality Project provides a possible resolution of the puzzle.

SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Hajime Shimao and Junpei Komiyama present an algorithm that imposes a fairness constraint on machine learning to prevent bias.

SFI hosts a working group July 10-13, 2018 to discuss climate projections for the next 50 years and what those projections may mean for the future human niche. 

This question of how the collective influences individual performance is central to the work of SFI’s investigation into the limits of human performance. In a workshop that takes place June 25-27, experts from a range of disciplines, including physiology, organizational behavior, sports analytics and applied mathematics, explore how the collective affects the individual.

Recent breakthroughs in nonequilibrium statistical physics have revealed opportunities to advance the "thermodynamics of computation," a field that could have far-reaching consequences for how we understand, and engineer, our computers.

The latest scientific understanding of time, and how time shapes our experience, were subjects of a June 19 panel discussion between physicist James Hartle, cosmologist Sean Carroll, evolutionary theorist David Krakauer, and science writer Jenniffer Ouellette. Watch the panel discussion.

An SFI workshop brings together thinkers in disciplines ranging from cosmology to chronobiology to neuroscience to explore how different timescales emerge.

On June 11, the SFI Press released the second volume in its Seminar Series, The Emergence of Premodern States, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and Paula L.W. Sabloff. This project tackles one of the most deceptively simple inquiries in archaeology: How did humans transition from hunter-gatherer societies into states — collective entities that are the movers and shakers of the modern world?

This week at SFI, scientists from fields ranging from hydrology and environmental engineering to political science and economics explore the interplay of environmental conditions and society around water.

An SFI working group meets to sort through the many ways to think about cumulative cultural evolution.  

An SFI team led by Professor Mirta Galesic has received a nearly $500,000 grant from the US Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to study how people form beliefs about genetically modified crops.

We humans make social judgments about ourselves and others that can appear contradictory. A new Social Sampling Model, presented by Professor Mirta Galesic and External Professor Henrik Olsson, suggest these apparently conflicting judgments can be explained by a single quantitative theory. 

Complexity scientists meet at SFI to examine how collective decisions get made in biological systems and to what degree those systems share a mechanism from one system to the next.

A new proof by SFI Professor David Wolpert sends a humbling message to would-be super intelligences: you can’t know everything all the time.

Researchers analyzed new data on the Chilean elections of the 1970s to understand how economies react to institutional change.

"Algorithmic Information Dynamics: From Networks to Cells," is a new online course that will introduce students to tools that allow them to explore causal relationships in complex datasets. Register online through Complexity Explorer.

SFI hosts a three-day working group to explore the effect of increasing oxygen on the early evolution of animals.

SFI will be inaugurating a new annual tradition June 7-8 — the InterPlanetary Festival, which will render Santa Fe’s Railyard district a platform for imagining future human civilizations, on and beyond Earth.

May 4-5, 2018, SFI will host its annual Science Board Symposium and will focus on complex time, to kick off a new research program that seeks to understand time's passage.

Three researchers are spending several months at SFI to tackle some big questions: “Why do we sleep less as we get older?” “What do city pigeons have in common with drug interactions?” and “Is there a trajectory underlying human history?” to name a few.