Santa Fe Institute

Reserve your free tickets for SFI’s Community Lecture with Tom McCarthy on May 12, 7:30 pm at @TheLensic. McCarthy will trace Moby-Dick’s tides and meridians to unpack the ways in which Melville overhauls the language of the Enlightenment and breaks open the horizons of modernity.  Drawing on twentieth-century visual art as well as classical and eighteenth-century philosophy, he will reveal a “grammar of the indefinite” at work in Melville’s prose. When: May 12, 2026 | 7:30pm Where: Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe, NM. Free tickets: lensic.org/events/the-ind… Presented free to the public thanks to generous sponsorship by the McKinnon Family Foundation, with support from The Lensic Performing Arts Center and the Santa Fe Reporter.

Beyond Borders, the quarterly column by SFI President David Krakauer, is available on Substack! In “The Biophysics of Paradigm Change,” Krakauer moves from evolved accelerometers to cultural knowledge, paradigm change, and adaptive technology. Read the full column here: sfiscience.substack.com/p/the-biophysi…

The Spring 2026 issue of Parallax is out! Explore the latest research, ideas, and voices from the Santa Fe Institute community in our quarterly newsletter. Read the new issue online now: sfi-edu.s3.amazonaws.com/sfi-edu/produc…

A chair can still look like a chair, even when reduced to a sparse cloud of points. Humans are remarkably good at recognizing objects from this kind of minimal 3D information.  A new study by SFI Program Postdoctoral Fellow Shuhao Fu and co-authors asks whether deep learning models represent 3D shapes in similar ways, and finds that hierarchical abstraction is key to more human-like performance. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

For over a century, psychology has largely assumed that humans learn by simplifying experience and retaining only key themes. In a new paper inspired by the AI phenomenon known as “double descent,” SFI’s Marina Dubova and co-author Sabina Sloman explore whether humans can instead learn through excess capacity, remembering more and generalizing better. The journal, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, publishes provocative research papers together with expert commentary from across the behavioral and brain sciences. Researchers with relevant expertise are invited to register their interest by May 15. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

Catch up on SFI’s first Community Lecture for 2026, Crossroads Democracy Panel. The panel featured Jenna Bednar, Samuel Bowles, Hahrie Han, Katrin Schmelz, and David Krakauer as moderator, and explored what science has to say about the history, economics, psychology, and politics of democracy, the citizens’ values that it both requires and may promote, and how a renewed expansion and deepening of democracy may be the best way to save it. Watch on SFI’s YouTube channel: youtu.be/XjiqWhlLKLE

Human intelligence involves many dimensions, from social interaction and learning to determining how tasks fit together and acting in the real world.   As part of SFI’s broader Nature of Intelligence project, a recent working group explored AGI, or artificial general intelligence, from the perspective of cognitive science, asking how current definitions of AGI overlap with how researchers understand natural intelligence. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

In this SFI Seminar, Andrew Shtulman (@andrewshtulman) of Occidental College challenges the idea that imagination is strongest in childhood. He argues that children’s imaginations are constrained by what they know, and that learning something new is key to expanding the imagination. Watch Shtulman’s SFI seminar: youtube.com/watch?v=rXRcLS…

A simple baseline for AI forecasting in machine learning. In a recent paper, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Yuanzhao Zhang and co-author William Gilpin show that a deceptively simple forecasting strategy — context parroting — can outperform several leading machine-learning forecasting models.  Researchers need to be careful when judging the performance and intelligence of AI systems and to keep working to open up the black box of how they make predictions, says Zhang, and this paper is a reminder about why. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

Reserve your free tickets for SFI’s first 2026 Community Lecture event, Crossroads Democracy Panel, on April 14 at the Lensic Performing Arts Center. Hosted by the Santa Fe Institute, this panel brings together scholars from political science, economics, psychology, and behavioral science to explore what research can tell us about the history of democracy, the values it requires and may promote, and whether a renewed expansion and deepening of democracy may be the best way to save it. Speakers: - Jenna Bednar, political scientist at University of Michigan, SFI External Faculty. - Samuel Bowles, economist at the Santa Fe Institute. - Hahrie Han, political scientist at Johns Hopkins University. - Katrin Schmelz, behavioral economist and psychologist at the Santa Fe Institute. - David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute and moderator of the open discussion. When: April 14, 2026 | 7:30 pm Where: Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe, NM. Free tickets: lensic.org/events/crossro… More info: santafe.edu/events/crossro… Presented free to the public thanks to generous sponsorship by the McKinnon Family Foundation, with support from The Lensic Performing Arts Center and the Santa Fe Reporter.

The latest issue of SFI's monthly e-newsletter is now available. Catch up on recent research, events, and news from the Santa Fe Institute. Read it here: mailchi.mp/santafe/sfi-e-… Subscribe to receive future issues: santafe.us11.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=79…

SFI External Professor Constantino Tsallis will serve as co-chair and synthesis lead of the 2027 Nobel Symposium in Physics, “Beyond Boltzmann: Complexity, Memory, and Non-Additive Entropies.”  The symposium will bring together leading experts to consolidate decades of work in generalized statistical mechanics, as the field works toward shared concepts, standards, and a clearer view of key open questions for future research. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

The built and natural worlds around us are full of examples of diversity from small, incremental evolutionary changes. Keyboard designs offer slightly different key spacing and press stiffness; two species appear almost identical, save for a slight change in body size. But sometimes, something entirely original appears. So, how do radically different entities come to be? How does the world produce true novelty? In his new book, The Origins of the New, SFI External Professor Doug Erwin argues that the generation of novelty, and not just the mundane speciation that we are familiar with, is a central topic in science. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

The brain has evolved a voracious appetite for energy, consuming about 20% of our daily total. So what makes that cost worth it? At a recent SFI working group, researchers from across disciplines examined how the high energetic cost of intelligence is balanced against its evolutionary advantages, and began charting a mathematical foundation for understanding that tradeoff. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

In this SFI Seminar, Carolyn Parkinson from the University of California, Los Angeles, explores how human thought and behavior unfold within social networks, and how the demands of navigating enduring social bonds may shape the brain.  Parkinson brings together social neuroscience and social network analysis to help bridge a long-standing gap between research on individual cognition and research on the social networks people live in. Watch Parkinson’s SFI seminar: youtu.be/ajpi37yvpMA?si…

Living cells are fundamentally nonequilibrium systems, meaning they constantly spend energy through seemingly one-way, irreversible processes, such as transcribing DNA into RNA, to keep life going. But how that irreversibility appears in the dynamics of individual genes has been difficult to measure. In a new paper in npj Complexity, SFI Postdoctoral Fellow James Holehouse develops analytic tools to study that question, using the canonical two-state model of gene expression to analyze thousands of mouse genes, revealing an interesting pattern. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

ACtioN Academy, a yearlong SFI program helping industry leaders explore how complexity science applies to their work, introduced participants to AI and complexity in its first virtual seminar, led by SFI External Professor Scott Page. The inaugural cohort will continue meeting online and in person throughout the year. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

The grid is in crisis. A century-old system for generating, distributing, and regulating electricity is struggling to cope with electrification, decarbonization, rising demand from data centers, and rapid technological change. At a recent SFI working group, researchers and practitioners explored how a complex adaptive systems approach could help build a more resilient, adaptive grid. “Piecemeal solutions aren’t enough,” says SFI External Professor Seth Blumsack. “How is the grid system organized as a whole? How can we address whole-systems problems?” santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

SFI External Professor Mark Newman (University of Michigan) has been awarded the 2026 John von Neumann Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for his contributions to the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of network science and their application to real-world systems. Newman is recognized for advancing the understanding of structure in complex networks and for developing widely used algorithms to identify and measure that structure. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…