Santa Fe Institute

In this SFI Seminar, John Harte (University of California, Berkeley, SFI) explores how to identify the causes of disturbance in degrading ecosystems and determine whether ecosystems are recovering.  Using empirical datasets and new theory that hybridizes mechanism and MaxEnt, he addresses how complex systems respond to perturbation and recovery. Watch Harte's SFI seminar: youtube.com/watch?v=nxM5Mx…

SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kaleda Denton (@KaledaDenton) 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.  Over her time at SFI, her work on conformity has shifted from developing theoretical models, the focus of her Ph.D., to testing them against real data. "It gave me a deep sense of meaning to find out that I'm contributing to understanding about something out there in the world," she says. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner (University of Zurich) was recently awarded the European Research Council’s Advanced Grant to study fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology.  The award will help support the SEASCAPES project, which will explore a paradox in evolutionary biology theory. Wagner believes this research could have strong implications in fields like medicine and protein engineering.  santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

Artificial intelligence has permeated most aspects of society, and the legal system is no exception. Today, every step of criminal justice, from the police investigation to the trial, can — and often does — involve AI, with implications both desirable and less so. Last month, three SFI faculty, Resident Professors Cristopher Moore and Melanie Mitchell and External Professor Melanie Moses (University of New Mexico), addressed these implications during panel discussions at the National Judicial Summit on the Foundation and Future of the Judiciary in Santa Fe. About 300 judges attended, two-thirds from New Mexico, the rest from 22 states and eight tribal nations. “If judges and juries are dazzled by the technology, it’s going to be hard for them to think critically about the evidence,” says Moore. “I want people to understand that AI has strengths, and it has weaknesses.” santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

Last fall, SFI External Professor 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. His research spans motor control and learning, stroke recovery, and the design of new neuro-rehabilitation approaches, much of it aimed at treatment, not just understanding. The CRN extends that line with a transdisciplinary approach. Krakauer has been part of SFI's external faculty since 2019, recently co-organizing a working group on the nature of intelligence in biological and machine systems. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

Reserve your free tickets for SFI's Community Lecture with Colin Camerer, "Why Your Brain Hates Losing," on July 21, 7:30 pm at the Lensic Performing Arts Center. Why does losing $10 hurt roughly twice as much as gaining $10 feels good? This talk explores loss aversion, one of the most robust and surprising findings in behavioral economics. Drawing on fMRI studies, patients with amygdala damage, capuchin monkeys, and more, the lecture shows how different regions of the brain encode gains and losses, and how emotion, not just cold calculation, creates our aversion to loss. - When: July 21, 2026 | 7:30 pm - Where: Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe, NM. - Free tickets: lensic.org/events/why-you… or watch the live stream on SFI's YouTube 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.

Ten years ago, David C. Krakauer, President at @sfiscience , warned Nautilus that the world's greatest problem was stupidity: applying outdated rules to new realities. Now he's expanded that idea in a remarkable new essay, What Makes Humans Stupid. nautil.us/what-makes-hum…

Our modern crises are intertwined: a warming planet, a rising human footprint, and societies strained by inequality and political polarization. And yet, Marten Scheffer approaches these problems with a fundamentally hopeful outlook in his new book, Tipping out of Trouble: How Societies Transformed and How We Can Do So Again. The book argues that societies, like other complex systems, can shift suddenly from one stable state to another, and asks how ours might move toward one where humans and other species can thrive in the centuries to come, writes SFI External Professor Tim Kohler in this book review. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

Jim Rutt, SFI Trustee Emeritus and Distinguished Fellow, passed away on May 27, 2026, at age 72. Rutt's earliest involvement with SFI was as a researcher in residence in the early 2000s, exploring complex adaptive systems, agent-based models, and market economies. He joined the Board of Trustees in 2003, served as Board Chair from 2009 to 2012, and remained an active Board member until 2022.  As Chair, he guided SFI through the turmoil that followed the 2008 financial crisis, insisting the Institute preserve its science at all costs and laying the groundwork for the years that followed. “Jim had a big presence — a booming voice, intellect, and personality — and he liked to think about very big issues,” says SFI Trustee Michael Mauboussin. “He was a super smart guy, very engaged, not afraid to entertain wacky ideas, and always willing to talk with people from all walks of life.” santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

Present-day LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude can write poetry and solve difficult algebra problems with astounding speed and precision. Some researchers have referred to this phenomenon of AI acquiring startlingly human-like skills as "emergence." But not everyone agrees with this terminology. A new paper by SFI's David Krakauer, Melanie Mitchell, and John Krakauer proposes a framework grounded in complexity science to clarify whether a system's capabilities are truly emergent. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

In this SFI Seminar, Aaron Benjamin of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign reviews several projects on metacognitive processes in human-AI interaction.  He examines how metacognitive information is embedded in human communication, how agents might possess analogous capacities, and how these capacities affect human-agent teamwork. Watch Benjamin's SFI seminar: youtu.be/04hgEIJ-uvc

Most people favor one hand, and that hand tends to be the better one at writing, at throwing, at managing chopsticks. The long-standing view is that the dominant hand is “born” more capable, its skills rooted in a brain hemisphere specialized for motor control.  A new study in PNAS argues that this difference in skill is not innate at all. It is the consequence of a lifetime of practice, and it surfaces only when we pick up a tool. A reminder that even a trait as seemingly fixed as handedness can be emergent, arising from the interplay of biology, behaviour, and culture rather than from any single cause. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

When a flock of Pine Grosbeaks unexpectedly wintered in a Bend, Oregon neighborhood, SFI External Professor Stefani Crabtree and her father started hearing something they couldn't explain: a quiet sound the birds made while feeding that they initially mistook for a squeaky gate.  In a new paper in the journal Birds, the pair document what may be a previously undescribed Pine Grosbeak vocalization, quiet calls that spread gradually through the flock in a pattern suggesting collective communication.  santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

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. Watch here: youtu.be/Ysh6RBAZB7k This was SFI's third Community Lecture for 2026. Remember, you can watch lectures from this and previous years on SFI’s YouTube channel.

Join us tomorrow at the Lensic Performing Arts Center for SFI’s Community Lecture with Thalia Wheatley. In this lecture, Wheatley will explore conversation as a powerful mechanism for coupling minds — aligning attention, beliefs, emotions, and behavior across individuals. Drawing on research from neuroscience, psychology, and network science, she will show how everyday features of human interaction are precision tools that synchronize brains, strengthen social connection, and shape mental health. Tomorrow | June 23 | 7:30 pm MT Free tickets: lensic.org/events/the-bea… 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 in PNAS, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kaleda Denton (@KaledaDenton) and colleagues test a different conformity model, based on the most popular opinion, not the average, against real-world data and find it consistently beats DeGroot averaging. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

In the 1970s, Thomas Nagel famously asked "what is it like to be a bat?" Today, large language models clamor to give an answer. Researchers optimistically argue that AI will allow humans to speak to whales, monkeys, even bats within a handful of years. However, interspecies communications experts have raised important questions about such bold claims.  To explore what interspecies communication actually requires, historically, philosophically, and empirically, SFI co-organized the working group "Interspecies: Decoding, Translation, and Interpretation" this May in collaboration with the Interspecies Internet. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

SFI External Professor Nicholas de Monchaux has been named the new dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design (CED), with a term commencing July 1, 2027.  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. He has been a frequent visitor to SFI since 2001, participating in research collaborations with SFI faculty, and joined SFI’s external faculty in 2025. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

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. He has been involved with SFI for more than three decades, joining the SFI Science Board in 1994 and serving as its chair from 2007 to 2010. santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

Reserve your free tickets for SFI’s Community Lecture with Thalia Wheatley on June 23, 7:30 pm at the Lensic Performing Arts Center. For more than a century, neuroscience has viewed intelligence as a property of individual brains. But brains did not evolve in isolation. Humans are an intensely social species whose minds are continuously shaped by other minds. Increasingly, evidence suggests that our most sophisticated cognitive abilities emerge not from solitary brains, but from networks of interacting people. In this lecture, Wheatley will explore conversation as a powerful mechanism for coupling minds — aligning attention, beliefs, emotions, and behavior across individuals. Drawing on research from neuroscience, psychology, and network science, she will show how everyday features of human interaction are precision tools that synchronize brains, strengthen social connection, and shape mental health. When: June 23, 2026 | 7:30 pm Where: Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe, NM. Free tickets: lensic.org/events/the-bea… 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.