The Complexity of Natural Selection

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The idea of natural selection can be written in haiku form, right? I mean, are you including the whole environment in which the selection is happening? That's one of the certainly misleading things about using the word natural selection. So another way to make this clearer is if I gave you a random string, and I said to you, Sean, I would like you to flip the bits to achieve this target string. And each time that was also random, you'd have to go through that sequence bit by bit, flipping accordingly. Your natural selection. It's so simple. Because you can just write down this thing and call it F sub I. No, no process. What is that

Complexity scientists have been able to make an impressive amount of progress despite the fact that there is not universal agreement about what "complexity" actually is. We know it when we see it, perhaps, but there are a number of aspects to the phenomenon, and different researchers will naturally focus on their favorites. Today's guest, David Krakauer, is president of the Santa Fe Institute and a longtime researcher in complexity. He points the finger at the concept of agency. A ball rolling down a hill just mindlessly obeys equations of motion, but a complex system gathers information and uses it to adapt. We talk about what that means and how to think about the current state of complexity science.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/10/242-david-krakauer-on-complexity-agency-and-information/

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David Krakauer received his D.Phil. in evolutionary biology from Oxford University. He is currently President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. Previously he was at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he was the founding director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and the Co-director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation. He was included in Wired magazine's list of "50 People Who Will Change the World."

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