News + Events

For most of human history, large societies have drawn clear lines between people who belong to the in-group and those who do not. These lines determine who is recognized, protected, or granted status, and who is excluded. But starting during the Enlightenment period, European societies and their offshoots began relaxing the rules around who was granted fundamental rights and protections, a development many scholars see as essentially unique in human history — one that has grown steadily over the past several centuries and continues today. 

In October, the International Society for Artificial Life recognized several SFI researchers and co-authors with the ISAL Award for Outstanding Publication of 2024. The award celebrates the paper “Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems,” which was published in Interface Focus last fall.

An Introduction to Ergodicity Economics is a new textbook that draws on physics to re-examine traditional economic theory. It begins with flipping a coin. And a hypothetical gambit. Imagine you were offered the following: Every time the coin lands on heads, your wealth increases by 50%. And every time tails comes up, your wealth drops by 40%. Should you accept? That depends on how you look at the predicted outcomes of this random system, says SFI Professor Ole Peters, a physicist at the London Mathematical Laboratory, who co-wrote the textbook with former LML colleague Alexander Adamou.

Three SFI External Professors and their collaborators received a 2025 SAF Research Award from the Shanghai Archaeology Forum for their ongoing project, “The Global Dynamics of Inequality over the Long Term.” The collaboration, nicknamed the GINI project, was one of 10 international projects celebrated at the SAF annual meeting in Shanghai this December, selected from 140 nominations.

When scientists test algorithms that sort or classify data they often turn to a trusted tool called Normalized Mutual Information (or NMI) to measure how well an algorithm’s output matches reality. But according to new research, that tool may not be as reliable as many assume.

From December 10–12, computer scientists, folklorists, physicists, marketing experts, cognitive neuroscientists, economists, mathematicians, psychologists, and other researchers convene at SFI to connect different approaches to understanding stories.

How much risk is any individual willing to take on? That depends, in part, on their individual resources and environment, which shape the learning strategies that influence their personal proclivity toward risk. A new model, published by SFI External Professor Paul Smaldino and colleagues in Psychological Review, makes predictions that mirror many aspects of modern society..

Jerdee focuses on building interpretable, unbiased methods for analyzing network data. Using tools such as Bayesian inference and related probabilistic approaches, he develops models that identify network structures while rigorously quantifying uncertainty. “I think a lot about how our methods shape what we believe we see in data,” he says. “If the instrument is biased, everything downstream will be too.”

A cell is fundamentally a container — a vessel that encapsulates life at the most basic level. Many biologists believe encapsulation of chemicals may have been necessary for evolution to gain traction. But how does encapsulation occur? Is it achieved easily — or is it elusive? SFI Professor Chris Kempes and colleagues investigate crucial aspects of this process in a recent paper in a special edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B focused on the origins of life.

A recent special issue of Philosophical Transactions B takes on one of the biggest mysteries in science: how life first began. Instead of trying to replay Earth’s exact history, the issue’s authors look for the universal rules that might make life possible anywhere in the cosmos — the right mix of energy, chemistry, and information.

Sahana Subramanyam was a participant in SFI's 2018 summer Research Experience for Undergraduates — now called the Undergraduate Complexity Research program. In this essay, she reflects on how the experience shaped the research questions she is now pursuing as a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University. 

Artificial-intelligence systems have made remarkable progress in recent years, but they still struggle with the kind of flexible, relational reasoning that comes naturally to humans. Program Postdoctoral Fellow Shuhao Fu studies how to bridge that gap.

In the 1980s and ’90s, SFI played laboratory to a promising new method known as agent-based modeling. In ensuing decades, agent-based models (ABMs) proliferated across many fields, including economics, but were largely sidelined in the wider field. A recent month-long working group met at SFI to supercharge wider use of ABMs in economics.

Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Maike Morrison builds mathematical tools to quantify and compare biological variation. Her work draws on ecology, population genetics, and information theory to study the structure, diversity, and stability of populations — whether those populations consist of species in an ecosystem, microbes in the gut, ancestry fractions in humans, or even assets in a financial portfolio.

SFI Resident Professor Melanie Mitchell has received a 2025 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The award celebrates researchers, institutional writers, and journalists producing high-quality public-facing work.

Why do people make short-term decisions that may not be in their long-term interest? An October 20–22 working group met to take stock of a new body of evidence from experiments and observations to explore decision-making in complex environments, with a specific goal of building theories that can integrate and model context generally.

The 2025 Postdocs in Complexity Global Conference, held September 15-18, drew 53 accomplished scholars for a four-day meeting focused on collaboration, networking, and idea-generation, and to deepen established research projects.

Global markets are complex systems, shaped by feedback loops, sudden shocks, and adaptive behavior that rarely follow textbook rules and which can’t be captured by neat equations.

That reality is at the center of a special issue on complexity economics published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization earlier this year. SFI’s Jenna Bednar, J. Doyne Farmer, and Penny Mealy edited the issue with R. Maria del Rio-Chanona, Jagoda Kaszowska-Mojsa, François Lafond, Marco Pangallo, and Anton Pichler.

Complexity science can help archaeologists understand how the everyday actions of ancient people led to the large-scale patterns we excavate today. In her new book, Thinking Through Archaeological Complexity, Santa Fe Institute External Professor Stefani Crabtree shows how methods drawn from complex systems, such as agent-based modeling and network analysis, can reveal hidden details of the very human stories that ultimately led to the artifacts, buildings, and food remains unearthed in the present day.

In a new paper in Science Advances, SFI External Professor Marcus Hamilton and colleagues present a new model showing the trade-offs between the cost and utility of new tools in small-scale societies.