Santa Fe Institute

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…

Francis Spufford, SFI’s newest Miller Scholar, is a prolific author whose writing often straddles the line between fiction and nonfiction. His history Red Plenty incorporates narrative, and novels like Cahokia Jazz are so deeply researched that they amount to counterfactual historical theses.  His new novel, Nonesuch, published March 10, is no exception; in this historical, fantasy thriller, the fate of the world rests on one woman’s ability to interpret and manipulate complex systems as she navigates the interrelationships between politics, economics, WWII, and magic. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

SFI External Professor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne (University of Vermont) has been named the 2026 recipient of the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics by the German Physical Society (DPG).  The annual award celebrates “outstanding original contributions that use physical methods to develop a better understanding of socio-economic problems” by an early-career researcher under the age of 40. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

Some computers are easy to spot, such as the artificial, human-built ones found in smartphones and laptops, with recognizable computational elements like input, output, energy cost, and logical processes. But scientists have long argued that many natural dynamic systems — from cells to brains to turbulence in fluids — carry out computations, too. In a new paper, SFI Professor David Wolpert and coauthor Jan Korbel from the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, Austria, introduce a framework for identifying and studying the computations encoded in natural dynamic systems, allowing researchers to map, or connect, those computations to ones carried out by traditional man-made computers. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

In this SFI Seminar, Seth Frey from the University of California, Davis, shares research on how social systems can change in unpredictable ways, especially when power within a system shifts to power over the system.  Frey presents observational, experimental, and modeling work on the psychological, selective, and structural forces that can cause governance institutions to drift away from their intended design. Watch Frey’s SFI seminar: youtube.com/watch?v=087fB2…

New book from the @SFIPress: The Economy as an Evolving Complex System IV. Every chapter is available for download as a free PDF.

How can we best learn about the world? A new paper applies the scientific method to itself, finding that some common strategies that scientists consider gold standards for designing experiments perform worse than random choice. In other words: random exploration may produce better theories than carefully-planned experiments. “These results contradict some common intuitions about the scientific method,” says lead author and SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Marina Dubova (@dubova_marina). santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

SFI External Professor Santiago Elena has been elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.  Elena, who leads the Evolutionary Systems Virology group at the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio) in Valencia, Spain, joins 62 other fellows in the class of 2026. His work explores how RNA viruses adapt to their hosts and how this adaptation enables them to manipulate the hosts’ cellular resources for their own benefit.  He draws on fields from experimental evolution and advanced molecular biology to molecular epidemiology and mathematical modeling. Since joining SFI’s External Faculty in 2008, Elena has organized several working groups to explore various aspects of virus evolution. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

A mystery novel, a history book, and a fantasy epic may have little in common in plot or style. But count the words inside them and a strange regularity appears: many new words show up early, then fewer and fewer as the author reuses what has already been introduced. That pattern, known as Heaps’ law, turns out not to belong to books alone. A new study in PNAS, led by SFI and MIT researchers, finds that the same rule also describes how complex systems grow, from living cells and corporations to universities and government agencies. As these systems get bigger, they add new functions more and more slowly. While systems vary in how much they invest in creating new functions, once those exist, their subsequent growth slows, following a remarkably universal pattern known as sublinear growth. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

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: lnkd.in/e-jhAzCA

SFI welcomes Program Postdoctoral Fellow Jordan Kemp @_jordantk.  A country’s GDP or a city’s population size represents organizational and individual decisions over time — statistics useful for policymaking, but which hide the complexity stemming from regional variations in choice. At SFI, Kemp hopes to leverage the richness of urban-growth data by capturing patterns of behaviors among different groups at various scales, from the individual to the population level.  santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

Final week to apply for SFI’s 2026 summer programs. Applications close soon for three of our immersive, residential experiences in complexity science: – Complex Systems Summer School (CSSS) – For graduate students, postdocs, and professionals interested in transdisciplinary research. – Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science (GWCSS) – For early-career researchers exploring computational approaches to the social sciences. – CSSS Journalism Fellowship – For experienced journalists reporting on science and complexity. Application deadline: February 4, 2026 Apply for CSSS and GWCSS here: santafe.edu/engage/learn/p… Apply for the Journalism Fellowship here: santafe.edu/journalism-fel…

We trust our memories because they feel natural, and because time seems to flow in only one direction, from the past to the present. Physics, however, allows for stranger possibilities that challenge our intuition. In a new paper, SFI researchers examine the Boltzmann brain hypothesis, a longstanding thought experiment that raises fundamental questions about memory, entropy, and the direction of time. The work clarifies how arguments for or against these ideas depend on assumptions about the past that are not fixed by physical laws alone. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

SFI President David Krakauer joins Jim Rutt, SFI Trustee Emeritus and Distinguished Fellow, on The Jim Rutt show for a wide-ranging conversation on intelligence, evolution, scientific risk-taking, how we come to understand complex phenomena, and much more. jimruttshow.com/david-krakauer…

Are you a scholar of the social sciences looking to include computational approaches in your research? SFI’s Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science (GWCSS) is designed for advanced Ph.D. students pursuing thesis research in computational social science. Participants work closely with peers and faculty to advance their own research and take part in collaborative modeling and complexity-based problem solving. Deadline: February 4, 2026 Apply here: santafe.edu/gwcss

A new study co-authored by SFI External Professor Laura Fortunato @anthrolog (University of Oxford) challenges a long-standing claim that polygynous marriage, where men have multiple wives, creates a surplus of men with no prospect of ever marrying. Counter to the widespread belief that a large contingent of unmarried men leads to negative social outcomes, including interpersonal violence and, in extreme cases, civil conflict, the research finds that polygyny often coexists with high rates of marriage among men. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

Advance your research and expand your network at the 2026 Complex Systems Summer School (CSSS). CSSS includes lectures, workshops, application-focused seminars, and team-based research projects. Participants gain valuable experience in transdisciplinary collaboration and explore real-world questions through the lens of complexity science. Deadline: February 4, 2026 Apply here: santafe.edu/csss