News + Events

SFI postdoctoral fellow Elhanan Borenstein and collaborators have used a technique called “reverse ecology” to see what life was like on Earth millions of years ago. By studying the genome and metabolic networks of an organism, Borenstein and colleagues were able to see the organism’s environment and how it relates to other species. This information could then be utilized on a larger scale to figure out the environmental events throughout millions of year of life on Earth.

The APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) region is hit by more geological and hydrometeorogical disasters than any other part of the world. SFI external professor, Mark Newman and colleagues found that of all people affected by disasters between 1975 and 2004; 43 percent live in Southern Asia and 41 percent live in Eastern Asia. For years researchers and scientists have been working on having more prediction structures readily available. A new tool from APEC Climate Centre in Korea may have found the answer. The Climate Information Tool Kit (CLIK) is a user-friendly interface that allows data to be retrieved for anywhere on earth.

SFI Chair of the Faculty and professor, David Krakauer was interviewed by Mary Charlotte on the Santa Fe Radio Café. Krakauer started the discussing by explaining the basics of theories, research, and science. He goes on to tell a history of Darwin and evolution. Throughout the interview, Krakauer also discusses how Darwin helps the scientific world today by research on diseases, vaccines, historical restructuring, and complex social systems.

Mortgage investors mostly agree that the government’s plan to reverse the housing slump is doing more harm than good. The government’s actions will increase borrowing costs because creditors would demand higher returns. Capital is going to cost more. Economist and SFI external professor John Geanakoplos has stated that “Obama’s plan will mostly be ineffective in cutting losses because it focuses on lowering payments rather than reducing homeowner debt.” Geanakoplos has advocated breaking contracts by putting the power to modify loan terms into the hands of independent arbiters.

Harvard Medical School professor and SFI external professor, Walter Fontana and colleagues have created Cellucidate, a new tool to help biologists uncover general principles about cellular signaling. Cellucidate would turn network diagrams of signaling pathways into living and breathing systems. Fontana mixed Kappa, a computer language “tuned to express basic interactions between proteins,” with a method called “coarse-graining” into computational models. By coarse-graining under Kappa’s rules, an automated compression is formed, filtering out permutations that have no bearing on the current model. The goals of Cellucidate include modeling and simulation to speed drug discovery and cure cancer. Fontana also helped found a company called Plectix BioSystems which provides a shared online space for scientists to use Cellucidate. Fontana adds, “Plectix wants to be the Facebook of proteins…where scientists will make models collaboratively.”

Warfare was sufficiently common and lethal among our ancestors to favor the evolution of what Sam Bowles, SFI Professor, calls parochial altruism, a predisposition to be cooperative towards group members and hostile towards outsiders. Biologists and economists have doubted that a genetic predisposition to behave altruistically (help others at a cost to oneself) could evolve (excepting the help extended to close genetic relatives). Skepticism among biologists arose primarily because most think that groups are not sufficiently different genetically to favor group selection (the most obvious evolutionary mechanism promoting altruism beyond the family). But both observation in natural settings and experiments (some of them by Bowles and his co authors) show that altruism is quite common among humans (much more so than in most other animals). In a series of recent papers Bowles shows that altruism could have evolved among humans as a result of the advantages that altruistic groups have in military and other competition with other groups.

During a recent German Physical Society meeting Stefan Thurner, SFI External Professor and director of complex systems research group at the Medical Univeristy of Vienna, reported that leverage--the practice by hedge funds and other investors of borrowing money to buy investments--is the root of many nettlesome properties of financial markets that classical economics cannot explain, including a propensity to crash. The model shows that many of the distinctive statistical properties of financial markets emerge together as rates of leverage climb.

Authors, including SFI External Professor Jessica Green, present a theoretical framework to describe stochastic, size-structured community assembly, and use this framework to make community-level ecological predictions. The model can be thought of as adding biological realism to Neutral Biodiversity Theory by incorporating size variation and growth dynamics, and allowing demographic rates to depend on the sizes of individuals.

Mark Buchanan, the science writer for Physics World, discusses the new field of “econophysics” which began at the Santa Fe Institute, a facility focused on innovative, high-risk, and inter-disciplinary research. Physicists are creating models of the economy and trying to help the future of markets and the economy.

We live in a post-Darwinian world, and it is no longer possible to conceive of life without some reference to Darwin's theories. But the world is more complex than Darwin supposed. Whereas an evolutionary perspective pervades all of biology, economics and politics, we are confronted by a range of post-Darwinian complexities and challenges that require a new and expanded set of ideas. Five short presentations by SFI faculty explore both the influence and the limitations of Darwin's thought on modern science, and introduce several of the ways the Santa Fe Institute has responded to and built upon Darwin's legacy.

Many people are regarding this current economic collapse as a “black swan” or an unpredictable sudden shift. But physicists and other scientists say it is predictable and they can prove it through science and technology. These scientists can create a computer model of our entire economy to study complex systems such as the financial markets. Yale economist and SFI External Professor John Geanakoplos is currently working with physicists in examining hedge funds and how their competition to win investors shifted the market. Economists need to partner with scientists to get a complete holistic view of the situation and work toward predicting the same situation early enough to stop in and make the necessary changes in time.

John Geanakoplos, SFI External Professor, and Susan Koniak write that the plan announced by the White House will not stop foreclosures because it concentrates on reducing interest payments, not reducing principal for those who owe more than their homes are worth. The plan wastes taxpayer money and won’t fix the problem.

features work by SFI External Professors Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, along with Lazslo Barabasi, Alessandro Vespigniani and Marc Vidal.

SFI External Professor and Professor of Economics and Information Science at Cornell University, Lawrence Blume, discusses the use of Darwinian ideas in economics ...

January 5, 2009 / SFI President Geoffrey West is researching the similarities between biology and human organizations such as cities. West began by researching biological networks which led him to compare his findings on natural systems to the social systems of cities. To illustrate his findings, West uses examples of an elephant versus a mouse to show how in biology, the bigger an individual is, the slower the pace of its life. However, the opposite shows true in social organizations such as cities, where the bigger the organization, the faster their actions. West attributes the difference to wealth creation of our societies. This creates an unsustainable way of life.

January 4, 2009 / SFI External Professor Duncan Watts explains the two main reasons why predicting outcomes is difficult. For one, individuals are hard to predict because we can change our behavior based on subtle details such as background music or a writer’s font selection. Secondly, individuals decide many things based on popularity with others. To demonstrate this, Watts and collaborators conducted online experiments to see how certain songs become hits while other songs don’t make it. When you have people making decisions based on what other people are doing, prediction becomes impossible due to the errors of social influence.

January 2, 2009 / Researchers at SFI have created complex mathematical algorithms to show how urban settings lead to higher levels of innovation. This is partly due to many strangers interacting in unpredictable ways. These researchers refer to it as “concentration of social interactions.” Other research has shown that city life impairs our memory and self-control but that nature, even a walk through a park, helps your mind. So then we need to find a way to balance the intellectual innovations while still being able to cope with stressors in densely populated urban areas.