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Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park

COMPLEXITY

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CHAPTER

The Importance of Brain Size in the Evolution of Life

People assumed brain size correlated with how smart you could be or how sophisticated you would be but it's not so clear that it's that simple. Even our ancestors 50,000 years ago well why do they need a larger brain volume? They may have been much more physical than anyone on planet today. It does connect through to the tension between sort of our success in the world as a species or just the probability of us continuing to propagate both as individuals and our particular gene lineages.

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Episode Title and Show Notes:

106 - Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park

Welcome to Complexity, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm Michael Garfield, producer of this show and host for the last 105 episodes. Since October, 2019, we have brought you with us for far ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. Today I step down and depart from SFI with one final appearance as the guest of this episode. Our guest host is SFI President David Krakauer, he and I will braid together with nine other conversations from the archives in a retrospective masterclass on how this podcast traced the contours of complexity. We'll look back on episodes with David, Brian Arthur, Geoffrey West, Doyne Farmer, Deborah Gordon, Tyler Marghetis, Simon DeDeo, Caleb Scharf, and Alison Gopnik to thread some of the show's key themes through into windmills and white whales, SFI pursues, and my own life's persistent greatest questions.

We'll ask about the implications of a world transformed by science and technology by deeper understanding and prediction and the ever-present knock-on consequences. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify and consider making a donation or finding other ways to engage with SFI at Santa fe.edu/engage. Thank you each and all for listening. It's been a pleasure and an honor to take you offroad with us over these last years.

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📚Reading & Videos:

The Lost World
by Michael Crichton

Jurassic Park
by Michael Crichton

The Evolution of Syntactic Communication
by Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, and Vincent Jansen

InterPlanetary Festival 2018 + SFI Science Explainer Animations
by SFI

Complexity Economics
by SFI Press

Supertheories and Consilience from Alchemy to Electromagnetism
by Simon DeDeo (2019 SFI Seminar)

How To Live in The Future, Part 4: The Future is Exapted/Remixed
by Michael Garfield

Artists Misusing Technology
by NXT Museum

The Collapse of Artificial Intelligence
by Melanie Mitchell (2019 SFI Symposium Talk)

The Debate Over Understanding in AI's Large Language Models
by Melanie Mitchell & David Krakauer