In memoriam: Charles ‘Chuck’ Stevens

Charles Stevens, a preeminent neurobiologist who revealed fundamental architectures in the brain and whose experimental techniques paved the way for decades of molecular neuroscience, passed away on October 21, 2022, in San Diego, CA. At the time of his passing Stevens, 88, was a distinguished professor emeritus at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and a fellow of the Santa Fe Institute’s Science Board and External Faculty.

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Cormac and SFI: an abiding friendship

In anticipation of Cormac McCarthy’s newest books, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” (Knopf, 2022), former SFI Miller Scholar Laurence Gonzales recollects McCarthy’s long and ongoing friendship with SFI.

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Research News Brief: The frugal case for energy transition

If you think clean energy is expensive, try fossil fuels. A new report in the journal Joule shows that a rapid transition to renewable energy sources by 2050 could save the global economy trillions of dollars compared to both a gradual transition and to no transition at all.

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Study: new model for the transmission of cultural knowledge

In a new study, published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, SFI's Simon DeDeo and Helena Miton describe a new model for understanding the transmission of tacit knowledge – that kind of working knowledge that is passed down with very limited specification. 

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SFI welcomes Program Postdoctoral Fellow James Holehouse

How do the regulatory systems of governments change as they grow? Do bigger governments require more or fewer bureaucrats per capita? Are more efficient bureaucracies possible? Program Postdoctoral Fellow James Holehouse is fascinated by how complex systems, from governments to cells, change over time. 

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Advancing science with machine learning

At the crossroads of computer science and computational science, the emerging field of scientific machine learning focuses on harnessing new ideas in machine learning together with predictive physics-based models to solve complex, real-world problems. On October 10–12, a group met to collaborate on new ideas about using scientific machine learning in complex fields.

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SFI welcomes Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Pedro Márquez-Zacarías

In biology, hierarchies are everywhere, from Linnaean taxonomy — the system we use to classify living things — to the social organization within a pod of gorillas. Biological hierarchies are often explained by the Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET) framework, which holds that evolutionary processes gave rise to life’s hierarchies. But this framework has some missing pieces, Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Pedro Márquez-Zacarías suggests.

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Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis named Citation Laureates

SFI Professor Sam Bowles and External Professor Herb Gintis have been selected as 2022 Citation Laureates by Clarivate "for providing evidence and models that broaden our understanding of economic behavior to include not only self-interest but also reciprocity, altruism, and other forms of social cooperation.”

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