COMPLEXITY

What is the difference between 100 kilograms of human being and 100 kilograms of algae? One answer to this question is the veins and arteries that carry nutrients throughout the human body, allowing for the intricate coordination needed in a complex organism. Energy requirements determine how the evolutionary process settles on the body plans appropriate to an environment — one way to tell the story of life’s major innovations is in terms of how a living system solves the problems of increasing body size with internal transport networks and more extensive regulation. And the same is true in our invented information systems, every bit as subject to the laws of physics as we are. Computers, just like living tissue, seek effective tradeoffs between their scale and energy efficiency. A physics of metabolic scaling — one that finds deep commonalities and crucial differences between ant hives and robot swarms, between the physiology of elephants and server farms — can help explain some of the biggest puzzles of the fossil record and sketch out the likely future evolution of technology. It is already revolutionizing how we understand search algorithms and the genius of eusocial organisms. And just maybe, it can also help us solve the challenge of sustainability for planetary culture.

This week’s guest is Melanie Moses, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Computer Science and Biology at the University of New Mexico, and Principal Investigator for the NASA Swarmathon. In this episode, we talk about her highly interdisciplinary work on metabolic scaling in biology and computer information-processing, and how complex systems made and born alike have found ingenious ways to balance the demands of growth and maintenance — with implications for space exploration, economics, computer chip design, and more.

If you enjoy this podcast, please help us reach a wider audience by leaving a five-star review at Apple Podcasts, or by sharing the show on social media. Thank you for listening!

Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Melanie’s UNM Webpage & full list of publications.

“Beyond pheromones: evolving error-tolerant, flexible, and scalable ant-inspired robot swarms” by Joshua Hecker & Melanie Moses.

“Energy and time determine scaling in biological and computer designs” by Moses, et al.

“Shifts in metabolic scaling, production, and efficiency across major evolutionary transitions of life” by DeLong, Moses, et al.

“Distributed adaptive search in T cells: lessons from ants” by Melanie Moses, et al.

“Curvature in metabolic scaling” by Kolokotrones, et al.

The NASA Swarmathon.

Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano.

Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

We live in a world so complicated and immense it challenges our comparably simple minds to even know which information we should use to make decisions. The human brain seems tuned to follow simple rules, and those rules change depending on the people we can turn to for support: when we decide to follow the majority or place our trust in experts, for example, depends on the networks in which we’re embedded. Consequently, much of learning and decision-making has as much or more to do with social implications as it has to do with an objective world of fact…and this has major consequences for the ways in which we come together to solve complex problems. Whether in governance, science, or private life, the strategies we lean on — mostly unconsciously — determine whether we form wise, effective groups, or whether our collective process gets jammed up with autocrats or bureaucrats. Sometimes the crowd is smarter than the individual, and sometimes not, and figuring out which strategies are better requires a nuanced look at how we make decisions with each other, and how information flows through human networks. Given the scale and intensity of modern life, the science of our social lives takes on profound importance.

This week’s guest is SFI Professor & Cowan Chair in Human Social Dynamics Mirta Galesic, External Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, and Associate Researcher at the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. In this episode we talk about her research into how simple cognitive mechanisms interact with social and physical environments to produce complex social phenomena…and how we can understand and cope with the uncertainty and complexity inherent in many everyday decisions.

If you enjoy this podcast, please help us reach a wider audience by leaving a five-star review at Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening!

Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Mirta’s Website.

Visit Mirta’s Google Scholar Page for links to all the papers we discuss.

Mirta’s 2015 talk at SFI: “How interaction of mind and environment shapes social judgments.”

Digital Transformation documentary about Mirta and her work.

Michelle Girvan’s SFI Community Lecture on reservoir computing.

Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano.

Follow us on social media:

Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

It’s easy to take modern Earth for granted — our breathable atmosphere, the delicately balanced ecosystems we depend on — but this world is nothing like the planet on which life first found its foothold. In fact it may be more appropriate to think of life in terms of verbs than nouns, of processes instead of finished products. This is the evolutionary turn that science started taking in the 19th Century…but only in the last few decades has biology begun to see this planet’s soil, air, and oceans as the work-in-progress of our biosphere. The story of our planet can’t be adequately told without some understanding of how life itself depends on opportunities that life creates, based on the energy and mineral resources made as byproducts of our metabolisms. A new, revelatory narrative of the last 3.8 billion years refigures living systems in terms of thermodynamic flows and the ever-growing range of possibilities created by our ever-more-complex ecologies. And in the telling, this new history sheds light on some of the biggest puzzles of the fossil record: why complex animals took so long to appear, why humans are the way we are, and maybe even why the sky is blue.

This week’s guest is evolutionary biologist and science journalist Olivia Judson, an honorary research fellow at The Imperial College of London who received her PhD from the University of Oxford and whose writing has appeared in The Economist, The New York Times, The Guardian, and National Geographic. She is also the author of the internationally best-selling popular science book, Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation. In this episode, we discuss her work on major energy transitions in evolution (the subject of her next book), and what we can learn by studying the intimate dance of biology and geology over the last 4 billion years.

Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Olivia’s Website.

“The energy expansions of evolution” in Nature.

The Atlantic on Olivia’s essay.

Music by Mitch Mignano.

Follow us on social media:

Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Whether or not you think you hold them, stereotypes shape the lives of everyone on Earth. As human beings, we lack the ability to judge each situation as unique and different…and how we group novel experiences by our past conditioning, as helpful as it often is, creates extraordinary complications in society. As modern life exposes us to an increasing number of encounters with the other in which we do not have time to form accurate models of someone   or some place’s true identity, we find ourselves in a downward spiral of self-reinforcing biases — transforming how we practice law enforcement, justice, and life online. Our polarized, irrational world calls for an intense look at what it will take to humanize each other — at traffic stops, in court, on social media, and anywhere our doubt about an unfamiliar face can lead to tragic consequences.

This week’s guest is Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. In this episode, we discuss how biases in our attention and cognition lead to unfair outcomes on the streets and on the Web, and where we can look for hope in countervailing strategies.

Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice by Brendan O’Flaherty & Rajiv Sethi (Harvard University Press).

Rajiv’s Website.

Albert Kao & Iain Couzin on collective intelligence and modular societies.

Aumann’s agreement theorem.

“We can’t disagree forever” (Geanakopolos & Polemarchakis).

Raissa D’Souza on the Collapse of Networks.

Geoffrey West on scaling laws and cities.

Music by Mitch Mignano.

Follow us on social media:

Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Looking back through time, the fossil record shows a remarkable diversity of forms, creatures unfamiliar to today’s Earth, suggesting ecosystems alien enough to challenge any sense of continuity. But reconstructed trophic networks — maps of who’s eating whom — reveal a hidden order that has been conserved since the first complex animals of half a billion years ago. These network models offer scientists an armature on which to hang new unifying theories of ecology, a way to answer questions about how energy moves through living systems, how evolution keeps producing creatures to refill specific niches, how mass extinctions happen, what minimal viable ecosystems are and why.  Untangling this deep structure of food webs may also shed light on technology and economics, and guide interventions to ensure sustainability in agriculture, conservation efforts, even venture capital investment.

This week’s guest is Jennifer Dunne, SFI’s Vice President for Science and Fellow at the Ecological Society of America. Dunne got her PhD in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley, joined SFI’s faculty in 2007, and sits on the advisory board for Nautilus Magazine.  In this second half of a two-part conversation, we discuss her work on reconstructing ancient food webs, and the implications of this research for our understanding of ecologies, extinctions, sustainability, and technological innovation.

Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Jennifer Dunne’s Website.

Related Reading:

Modern Lessons from Ancient Food Webs

Parasites Affect Food Web Structure Primarily through Increased Diversity and Complexity

Highly resolved early Eocene food webs show development of modern trophic structure after the end-Cretaceous extinction

The roles and impacts of human hunter-gatherers in North Pacific marine food webs

A primer on the history of food web ecology: Fundamental contributions of fourteen researchers

Quanta Magazine features Dunne on humans in food webs.

Jennifer on This Week in Science at InterPlanetary Festival 2019.

Learn more about The ArchaeoEcology Project.

Follow us on social media:

Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

For as long as humans have erected walls around our cities, we’ve considered culture separate from the encircling wilderness. This difference came to be expressed in our “man vs. nature” narratives, beliefs in our dominion over the nonhuman world, and lately even the assertion that the Earth would be better off without us. Ecology research has strangely almost never included humans in the picture. And yet Homo sapiens is a phenomenon of nature, woven into food webs, demonstrating the same principles at work as any other creature on this planet. New research into trophic networks — who’s eating whom — has bridged ecology and archaeology to shed light on the many ways that human beings have participated as key members of ecosystems round the globe. The emerging portrait of our place in nature offers us the opportunity to tell new stories of the hairless ape and what we’re doing here — and just in time, perhaps, to help reshape our attitudes toward conservation and development, and what we dare to hope for in the years to come.

This week’s guest is Jennifer Dunne, SFI’s Vice President for Science and Fellow at the Ecological Society of America. Dunne got her PhD in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley, joined SFI’s faculty in 2007, and sits on the advisory board for Nautilus Magazine.  In the first half of a two-part conversation, we discuss her work on food and use webs and the ArchaeoEcology Project working group at SFI, where she and her collaborators are transforming how we think of human history.

Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Jennifer Dunne’s Website.
Quanta Magazine features Dunne on humans in food webs.

The New York Times features Dunne’s collaborator, SFI Postdoc Stefani Crabtree and her work on the Martu people of Australia.

Learn more about The ArchaeoEcology Project.

Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

If you’re a human in this century, the odds are overwhelming that you are a city-dweller. These hubs of human cultural activity exert a powerful allure – and most people understand that this appeal is due to some deep link between the density, pace, wealth, and opportunity of cities. But what is a city, really? And why have the vast majority of human beings migrated to these intense and often difficult locations? Cities breed not just ideas but also crime, disease, and inequality. We live amidst a shift in what a normal human life looks and feels like, akin to the transition from our lives as nomadic hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers — only this time, it is happening before our eyes. How can we cultivate the best that cities offer and minimize the predicaments they pose? A powerful new science of the city has emerged in just the last few years, connecting the metropolis through physics to the properties that govern animal metabolisms, ecological diversity, and economics.

This week’s guest is Luis Bettencourt, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago. We spoke while he was visiting Santa Fe to lead SFI’s Global Sustainability Summer School to talk about what makes a city such a fertile zone for innovation of all kinds, and how to help ensure the future of the city is one human beings want to live in.

Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Visit The Mansueto Institute's Website.

Watch a short video on Bettencourt’s work to eliminate slums.

Here are the three papers we discussed in this episode:

"Toward cities without slums: Topology and the spatial evolution of neighborhoods" in Science Advances.

"The Origins of Scaling in Cities" in Science.

“Towards a statistical mechanics of cities” in Science Advances.

Learn more about SFI's Global Sustainability Summer School.

Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

If complex systems science had a mascot, it might be the murmuration. These enormous flocks of starlings darken skies across the northern hemisphere, performing intricate airborne maneuvers with no central leadership or plan. Each bird behaves according to a simple set of rules about how closely it tracks neighbors, resulting in one of the world’s most awesome natural spectacles.

This notion of self-organizing flocks of relatively simple agents has inspired a new paradigm of engineering, building simple, flexible, adaptive swarms that stand to revolutionize the way we practice medicine, map ecosystems, and extend our public infrastructure. We’re living at the dawn of the age of the robot swarm – and these metal murmurations help us create communications networks, fight cancer, and evolve to solve new problems for an age that challenges the isolated strategies of individuals.

This week’s guest is Sabine Hauert, Assistant Professor in Robotics at the University of Bristol and President/Co-founder of robohub.org, a non-profit dedicated to connecting the robotics community to the world. In this episode, we talk about how swarms have changed the way we think about intelligence, and how we build technologies for everything from drug delivery to home construction.

Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Hauert Lab Website.

RoboHub Website.

NanoDoc Website.

Sabine at Nature on the ethics of artificial intelligence.

Sabine's 2019 SFI Community Lecture.

Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

A few years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, upsetting centuries of certainty about the history of life, he wrote a now-famous letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker, British botanist and advocate of evolutionary theory. "But if (and oh what a big if),” Darwin’s letter reads, “we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity etcetera present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes.”

That was 1871. Nearly 150 years hence, humankind has worked out the details of the evolutionary process to exquisite depth and resolution, but abiogenesis - the origins of life - remains one of the greatest mysteries of our world. Fierce theoretical debates rage on between those who think life got its start in deep sea hydrothermal vents and those who think it started in “some warm little pond” – not to mention more heterodox hypotheses. The consequences are enormous – shaping plans for interplanetary exploration, changing our approach to medicine, and maybe foremost, settling the existential question of what life is in the first place.

This week’s episode was recorded live at the Santa Fe Institute’s InterPlanetary Festival in June 2019. The panel features evolutionary theorist David Krakauer, President of SFI; biochemist Sarah Maurer, Assistant Professor at Central Connecticut State University; and SFI Professor Chris Kempes, who works on biological scaling laws. In this discussion, we present a spectrum of perspectives on the origins of life debate, and speak to the importance of presenting this unsettled science as itself an evolutionary object...

Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

David Krakauer's Webpage & Google Scholar Citations.

Sarah Maurer's Website.

Chris Kempes's Website.

InterPlanetary Festival's Website.

Complexity Explorer's Origins of Life Online Course.

Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

For 300 years, the dream of science was to understand the world by chopping it up into pieces. But boiling everything down to basic parts does not tell us about the way those parts behave together. Physicists found the atom, then the quark, and yet these great discoveries don’t answer age-old questions about life, intelligence, or language, innovation, ecosystems, or economies.

So people learned a new trick – not just taking things apart but studying how things organize themselves, without a plan, in ways that cannot be predicted. A new field, complex systems science, sprang up to explain and navigate a world beyond control.

At the same time, improvements in computer processing enabled yet another method for exploring irreducible complexity: we learned to instrumentalize the evolutionary process, forging machine intelligences that can correlate unthinkable amounts of data. And the Internet’s explosive growth empowered science at scale, in networks and with resources we could not have imagined in the 1900s. Now there are different kinds of science, for different kinds of problems, and none of them give us the kind of easy answers we were hoping for.

This is a daring new adventure of discovery for anyone prepared to jettison the comfortable categories that served us for so long. Our biggest questions and most wicked problems call for a unique and planet-wide community of thinkers, willing to work on massive and synthetic puzzles at the intersection of biology and economics, chemistry and social science, physics and cognitive neuroscience.

Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

David Krakauer's Webpage & Google Scholar Citations.

Follow us on social media: 
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn