Study: Reproductive inequality in humans and other mammals

Is human reproduction exceptionally egalitarian compared to other mammals, or do we have high "reproductive skew"? It's a question that a team of more than 100 researchers tackled in a recent paper published in PNAS. Their finding? “Human exceptionalism has been greatly exaggerated,” says SFI External Professor Monique Borgerhoff Mulder (UC Davis).

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In Memoriam: James Pelkey

James Pelkey, former member of the SFI Board of Trustees, passed away on February 16, 2023, at the age of 77 in Maui, Hawaii. A committed supporter of the research carried out at SFI, Pelkey served on SFI’s Board of Trustees for a decade, and became the Chair of the Board from 1990-1992.

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Simulation games for pandemic preparedness

SFI Science Board member and External Professor Lauren Ancel Meyers and colleagues organized a May 17-18 workshop to reimagine how pandemic simulation games can help us prepare for the superbugs of the future, bringing together epidemiologists; military war game specialists; officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and experts in human behavior, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. 

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Humans and AI: The many dimensions of understanding

AI and the Barrier of Meaning 2, a workshop held at the Santa Fe Institute on April 24–26, brought together experts working in AI, cognitive science, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, neuroscience, and law. Videos of the talks from the workshop are now available on YouTube. Similar to the first AI and the Barrier of Meaning workshop, held in 2018, the event focused on questions related to “understanding” and what it means to “extract meaning” in a humanlike way.

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New book: Sleeping Beauties examines the mysteries of dormant innovations

Human innovations often arise "ahead of their time," but evolution, we’re told, innovates only in response to environmental conditions. In his new book, Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture, SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner urges us to consider another possibility. “What if,” he asks, “many innovations arise before their time,” in nature just as in human culture? 

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Study: Do higher-order interactions promote synchronization?

Understanding higher-order interactions — phenomena that involve three or more entities — can be tricky, says SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Yuanzhao Zhang. In a new paper in Nature Communications, Zhang and his colleagues show how the choice of network representation can influence the observed effects.

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How the pandemic exacerbated racial inequalities in the US criminal legal system

As Covid roared through prisons in 2020, the U.S. prison population fell by as much as 30 percent, creating the largest, fastest reduction in prison population in American history. But this decarceration disproportionately benefited white incarcerated people, sharply increasing the fraction of incarcerated Black and Latino people. A new study in Nature shows that this increased racial disparity in U.S. prisons stems in large part from a long-standing problem with the justice system: Non-white people tend to get longer sentences than white people for the same crimes.

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Conceptual framework for how societies adapt to change

In times of crisis, groups of people respond in a variety of ways — with sometimes vastly different outcomes. A company might be resilient during a recession while another business fails. Some groups refused to get vaccinated for COVID-19, remaining more vulnerable to the virus, while others quickly adopted the new vaccine. Why do some communities and organizations struggle to respond deftly to threats? A new paper in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface presents a new conceptual framework that could provide answers in the future.

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Study: Rethinking how we report on AI research

AI research papers typically report only aggregate results, without the granular detail that will allow other researchers to spot important issues like errors in recognizing certain faces on racial and gender lines. In a new paper, SFI Professor Melanie Mitchell and co-authors explore this problem and suggest solutions. 

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SFI Press reissues Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information

The specter of information is haunting the sciences. With these words, Wojciech H. Zurek invited fellow scientists to attend the 1989 Santa Fe Institute workshop on which the proceedings volume Complexity, Entropy & the Physics of Information was based. In a two-volume reprint, the SFI Press offers an affordable and accessible update to the original text, with a new preface from attendee Seth Lloyd that contextualizes the significance of this record of a meeting that marked the intersection of information, physics, complexity, and computation.

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Three SFI faculty elected to AAAS

SFI External Professors Amos Golan, Matthew Jackson, and Doug Eriwn have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for 2022, the association announced on January 31, 2023.

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