Santa Fe Institute

Scientists have been refining ways to model systems, from bridges and space shuttles to forest fires and tumors. These “digital twins” mimic their real-world counterparts and evolve alongside them. SFI’s recent working group on digital twins discussed breakthroughs and open challenges.

Mathematical proof dates back to Euclid in 300 BCE, yet little is known about what happens in the mind when humans solve proofs. This week, an SFI working group brought together mathematicians, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and philosophers to ask what it means to understand a proof.

Reserve free tickets for SFI’s Community Lecture with John Krakauer, October 20, 7:30 pm at the Lensic. The damaged nervous system has latent capacity which, if harnessed, can restore function. This talk explores how it may be possible to unmask and express that capacity. Tickets:

In this SFI Seminar, Keith Hengen (WashU) explores the criticality hypothesis, proposing that healthy brains operate near a tipping point that maximizes computational capacity. Using experimental evidence, he examines how criticality shapes learning, development, sleep, and neurological disorders.

Applications for the 2027 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships are open! Marina Dubova just completed SFI’s Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowship, and she reflects on what the experience meant to her and her research. Deadline: September 30, 2026 Requirements & application: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

In her new book, "The Traveler," SFI Miller Scholar Andrea Wulf gives us George Forster, an explorer and naturalist who joined James Cook's expeditions at 17 and "observed with both his mind and his heart." Despite a sad end, Wulf makes the arc of his life glorious, writes SFI Professor Cris Moore.

Applications are open for SFI's 2027 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships. SFI is looking for recent Ph.D. graduates with strong quantitative and computational skills who want to pursue independent, transdisciplinary research. Deadline: September 30, 2026 Apply: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

As American midterm elections approach, conventional narratives no longer fully explain who votes how. SFI's Brandon Ogbunu and Andrew Stier mapped implicit racial bias in 140 American cities onto voting records and found patterns that didn't match conventional political wisdom.

Catch up on SFI’s recent Community Lecture “The Indefinite Sublime: Tom McCarthy on Moby-Dick.” In this lecture, McCarthy reflected on the richness and complexity of Melville’s novel, and on why Moby-Dick still invites new ways of reading and thinking.

SFI is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work with SFI Professor David Wolpert on the thermodynamic cost of distributed computation, from digital circuits to human brains. We are seeking a scholar with expertise in physics, computer science, or a related field. santafe.edu/about/jobs/p...

A random walk is a simple model of motion: each step goes in a randomly chosen direction, through surroundings that stay fixed. In a new Physical Review Letters paper, SFI's Sidney Redner and colleagues test what happens when the walker pushes obstacles aside, deforming the medium as it goes.

Optimism isn't quite a taboo word in science, but it's not a sentiment most scientists would use to describe their outlook. In It Could Be Otherwise, SFI Fractal Faculty Stuart Firestein argues that optimism has always been a character in modern science, writes SFI Professor C. Brandon Ogbunu.

Animals forage, immune cells patrol for pathogens, and algorithms trawl for optimal solutions. Searching is ubiquitous, says SFI's Aanjaneya Kumar. Searchers drop out, and new ones arrive. In a new paper, Kumar and Samantha Linn show how that shifting cast shapes the search.

Influenza spreads faster in a crowded barracks or prison. Ebola proliferates when hospital beds run short. A new paper in Biology Letters, led by SFI's Brandon Ogbunu, introduces "structural causal influence," quantifying how social inequality shapes disease spread and whether interventions work.

In this seminar, SFI External Professor Holly Moeller (University of California, Santa Barbara) explores how organisms gain access to metabolism from other species through interactions ranging from mutualism to predation. Watch Moeller's SFI seminar:

SFI welcomes six new External Faculty members for 2026. These distinguished researchers expand our global network and help advance the science of complex systems across disciplines and institutions. Learn more about them here: www.santafe.edu/news-center/...

Applications for the 2027 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships are open! Katrin Schmelz just completed SFI’s Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowship, and she reflects on what the experience meant to her. Deadline: September 30, 2026 Requirements & application: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

Every human holds implicit biases, involuntary associations about members of different social groups. But these biases are not fixed, they are malleable reflections of our everyday experiences. A new study shows they are harder to change in large cities, with millions of people, than in small ones.

Competition to publish in elite journals is fierce, yet the confidentiality of the peer-review process — the gold standard for assessing whether a study meets the criteria for publication — has long made the process itself hard to study. A new paper in Science Advances offers a first look.

In aviation, nations run their own airspace but follow shared rules that keep thousands of planes from colliding. Space needs the same. In an article for Nature, SFI's France Córdova, lead author Gioia Rau, and colleagues call for a shared framework to coordinate operations as orbital debris grows.

From HIV and hepatitis C to Zika, Ebola, and mpox viruses, the list of multiroute pathogens is growing rapidly. In a Focus article recently published in Science Advances, SFI's Samuel Scarpino explains why new modelling techniques are needed to capture the dynamics of these multiroute pathogens.

Applications are open for SFI's 2027 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships. SFI is looking for recent Ph.D. graduates with strong quantitative and computational skills who want to pursue independent, transdisciplinary research. Deadline: September 30, 2026 Apply: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

Catch up on our most recent Community Lecture: "Why Your Brain Hates Losing" with Colin Camerer, on loss aversion and how different regions of the brain encode gains and losses. Watch here:

There's a paradox in anthropology: the larger a population gets, the better protected it should be from random fluctuations that could cause collapse. Yet the record is rife with large civilizations that failed. New research from SFI's Marcus Hamilton points to an unexpected culprit: cooperation.

Join us today at the Lensic Performing Arts Center for SFI's Community Lecture with Colin Camerer, "Why Your Brain Hates Losing." 7:30 pm MT Free tickets: lensic.org/events/why-y... or watch the live stream on SFI's YouTube (www.youtube.com/live/atJ0APP...)

In this SFI Seminar, John Harte (University of California, Berkeley) explores how to identify the causes of disturbance in degrading ecosystems and determine whether they're recovering. Using empirical datasets and new theory, he addresses how complex systems respond to perturbation and recovery.

SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kaleda Denton (@kaledadenton.bsky.social) was among roughly 30 early-career researchers selected for this year's Rising Stars in Computational and Data Sciences workshop, held at SFI in April.

SFI's Andreas Wagner (University of Zurich) was awarded the European Research Council’s Advanced Grant to study fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology. The award will help the SEASCAPES project. Wagner believes this could have strong implications in fields like medicine and protein engineering.

AI now touches every step of criminal justice, from police investigation to trial, with implications both desirable and less so. Last month, SFI's Cristopher Moore, Melanie Mitchell, and Melanie Moses addressed them at the National Judicial Summit in Santa Fe, attended by about 300 judges.

Last fall, SFI's John Krakauer was named director of the Centre for Restorative Neurotechnology (CRN) at Lisbon's Champalimaud Foundation, a center he helped create. Krakauer has been connected to Champalimaud for more than a decade, first as a visiting scientist at its Centre for the Unknown.

Reserve free tickets for SFI's Community Lecture with Colin Camerer, July 21, 7:30 pm at the Lensic. Why does losing $10 hurt roughly twice as much as gaining $10 feels good? This talk explores loss aversion, and how emotion, not just cold calculation, creates our aversion to loss. Tickets:

New book by SFI's Marten Scheffer. Our crises are intertwined: a warming planet, a rising human footprint, inequality, polarization. Yet Scheffer is hopeful: societies, like other complex systems, can tip suddenly toward a better, more stable state. Reviewed by SFI's Tim Kohler.

Present-day LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude can write poetry and solve algebra problems. Some researchers call this "emergence," but not everyone agrees. A new paper by SFI's David Krakauer, Melanie Mitchell, and John Krakauer proposes a framework to clarify whether AI capabilities are truly emergent.

Your dominant hand isn't better because it's "born" that way. It's just had more practice, a new PNAS study finds. The skill gap appears only when you pick up a tool, suggesting handedness is, in part, a fingerprint of human tool-use culture.

Catch up on our most recent Community Lecture: “The Beautiful Engineering of Us: From Neurons to Collective Minds” with Thalia Wheatley, exploring how human intelligence emerges not only from individual brains, but from networks of interacting people.

Join us tomorrow for SFI’s Community Lecture with Thalia Wheatley. Wheatley will explore conversation as a powerful mechanism for coupling minds — and what this means in the age of AI. 7:30 pm MT | Free tickets: lensic.org/events/the-b... or watch the live stream on SFI’s YouTube

The dominant model of opinion dynamics has long assumed that people average all views, outliers included. In a new paper, SFI's Kaleda Denton and colleagues test a different model, based on the most popular opinion, against real-world data and find it consistently beats DeGroot averaging.

SFI's Nicholas de Monchaux has been named the new dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. De Monchaux, an acclaimed architect, urbanist, and scholar, has led MIT’s Department of Architecture since 2020 and is returning to UC Berkeley, where he was a professor from 2006 to 2019.

SFI Science Board Fellow Simon Levin (Princeton University) has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society. Since the 1970s, his work has been rooted in mathematical theories and models to better understand a range of environmental issues.

In this SFI Seminar, Eric Goles of the University of Adolfo Ibáñez explores fungal automata, a cellular automaton model in which information flows only horizontally or vertically. He shows that despite these constraints, it can simulate arbitrary Boolean circuits and are computationally universal.

SFI's Brian Enquist has received the Ecological Society of America’s Robert H. MacArthur Award, one of the field’s highest honors for mid-career ecologists. The award recognizes Enquist’s work linking functional traits in organisms to the structure and functioning of communities and ecosystems.

SFI's Han van der Maas has been named the next director of the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). A professor of psychological methods, he has been involved with the IAS since its founding in 2016, previously as a principal investigator and with the management team.

SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Marina Dubova (@mdubova.bsky.social) has received a 2026 Glushko Dissertation Prize from the Cognitive Science Society and the Glushko-Samuelson Foundation. The prize recognizes recent Ph.D. dissertations for groundbreaking work in cognitive science.

In March, SFI's Aaron Clauset (University of Colorado Boulder) received two notable honors: he was elected a 2025 Fellow of the @aaas.org and named 2026 Distinguished Alumni by UNM. Both honors recognize Clauset’s foundational contributions to network science and computational social science.

SFI's Laurent Hébert-Dufresne has received the 2026 Erdős-Rényi Prize, the top honor for early-career researchers in network science. “This recognition reflects the deeply collaborative nature of complex systems research,” says Hébert-Dufresne.

Is the scientific enterprise too risk-averse? SFI's Brandon Ogbunu joined an Open to Debate event at Johns Hopkins University, alongside other scientists and scholars, to discuss whether today’s incentive structures reward safe, incremental work over bold scientific thinking. Watch the debate:

In this SFI Seminar, Gianfranco Bertone of the University of Amsterdam traces the search for dark matter, from the observations and arguments that made it central to cosmology, to the experiments shaping the next decade of inquiry — such as using gravitational waves to probe dark matter.

All of biology is transient. Over time, identical cells can diverge into subgroups with different behaviors (size, protein expression, metabolism). A new paper by SFI’s James Holehouse shows these population patterns don’t always reflect single-cell behavior or mechanisms.

In this SFI Seminar, Amos Golan (American University, SFI) discusses how to make decisions when available information is insufficient to identify a unique solution. He presents an information-theoretic approach and compares it to other decision criteria using simulations and empirical examples.

Reserve your free tickets for SFI’s Community Lecture with Tom McCarthy on May 12, 7:30 pm at the Lensic. McCarthy will explore the classic Moby-Dick, tracing the “grammar of the indefinite” at work in Melville’s prose. Tickets: lensic.org/events/the-i... More info: www.santafe.edu/events/the-i...