Organisms aren’t the only products of the evolutionary process. Cultural products such as writing, art, and music also undergo change over time, subject to both the constraints of the physical environment and the psychologies of those who make them. In recent years, the study of cultural evolution has exploded with new insights — revelations into the dynamics of how culture is transmitted, how it mutates under different pressures, and why some forms are remarkably resilient and stable across time and space. Just as in biology, patterns in the structures of our artifacts converge on universals and diverge to meet the needs of their distinct environments. Certain forces ratchet up complexity in culture, whereas others act like gravity and draw the works of different societies into shared basins of attraction. Finding the fundamentals behind both the unity and the diversity of cultures, and what cultural evolution does and doesn’t have in common with biological evolution, is a field of rich mystery. New research into structural and cognitive constraints on culture leads us into some of the most fertile questions known to science…Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring 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.This week we speak to SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow, Omidyar Fellow, AND ASU-SFI Center Fellow Helena Miton about her work on cultural evolution — namely, her recent Royal Society Proceedings B paper on "How material constraints affect the cultural evolution of rhythm" with Thomas Wolf, Cordula Vesper, Günther Knoblich, and Dan Sperber and the Current Anthropology pre-print she co-authored on "The predictable evolution of letter shapes: An emergent script of West Africa recapitulates historical change in writing systems" with Piers Kelly, James Winters, and Olivier Morin.If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. You can find numerous other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening!Check out Helena’s SFI Page, Google Scholar Page, and Twitter Account.Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInIf you liked this episode, you may also like Helena's appearance on the Here We Are Podcast with Shane Mauss.

On the one hand, we have math: a world of forms and patterns, a priori logic, timeless and consistent. On the other, we have physics: messy and embodied interactions, context-dependent and contingent on a changing world. And yet, many people get the two confused, including physicists and mathematicians. Where the two meet, and the nature of the boundary between them, is a matter of debate — one of the greatest puzzles known to science and philosophy — but some things can be said for sure about what can and cannot be accomplished in the search for ever-better models of our world. One is that every model must contain assumptions, and that there’s no way to prove a given strategy will outperform all others in all possible scenarios. This insight, captured in the legendary No Free Lunch theorems by SFI’s David Wolpert and William Macready, has enormous implications for the way think about intelligence, computers, and the living world.  In the twenty-plus years since its publication, No Free Lunch has sparked intense debate about the kinds of claims we are, and are not, justified in making…Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring 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. This week we speak with SFI Professor David Wolpert about the No Free Lunch Theorems and what they mean for life, the universe, and everything… Dive into David Wolpert’s website:https://davidwolpert.weebly.com/and Google Scholar page:https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PRjgI8kAAAAJ&hl=en If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. You can find numerous other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Whether you live in the USA or have just been watching the circus from afar, chances are that you agree: “polarization” dominates descriptions of the social landscape. Judging from the news alone, one might think the States have never been so painfully divided…yet nuanced public polls, and new behavioral models, suggest another narrative: the United States is largely moderate, and people have much more in common with each other than they think. There’s no denying our predicament: cognitive biases lead us to “out-group” one another even when we might be allies, and the game of politics drives a two-party system into ever-more-intense division, until something has to give. But the same evidence from social science offers hope, that we might find a way to harness our collective thinking processes for the sake of everyone and row together toward a future big enough to hold our disagreements.Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring 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.In this episode we talk to SFI External Professor Henrik Olsson and SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow, Omidyar Fellow, and Baird Hurst Scholar Vicky C. Yang about their work on social cognition and political identity. In a conversation that couldn’t be more timely, we ask: How can we leverage an understanding of networks for better political polling and prediction? What are the meaningful differences between one’s values and one’s affiliations? And is the American two-party system working for or against a cohesive republic?If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. You can find numerous other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening!Henrik’s Google Scholar PageVicky’s Google Scholar PageResearch we discuss in this episode:Falling Through the Cracks: A Dynamical Model for the Formation of In-Groups and Out-GroupsA Sampling Model of Social JudgmentHarvesting the wisdom of crowds for election predictions using the Bayesian Truth SerumWhy are U.S. Parties So Polarized? A "Satisficing" Dynamical ModelDo two parties represent the US? Clustering analysis of US public ideology surveyProject Page for the SFI-USC Dornslife Polling Research CollaborationFor more on social cognition and collective decision-making, listen to COMPLEXITY episodes 9 with Mirta Galesic and 20 with Albert Kao.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInJoin our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episodePodcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano

Now, maybe more than ever before, it is time to learn the art of skepticism.  Amidst compounded complex crises, humankind must also navigate a swelling tidal wave of outright lies, clever misdirections, and well-meant but dangerous mistaken claims….in other words, bullshit. Why is the 21st Century such a hotbed of fake news? How can we structure our networks and their incentives to mitigate disinformation and encourage speaking truth to power? And whose responsibility is it to inform the public and other experts about scientific research, when those insights require training to understand?Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and in each episode we’ll bring 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.This week, we talk to Former SFI External Professor Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, both at the University of Washington, who recently translated their landmark undergraduate course on Calling Bullshit into an eminently readable and illuminating book from Penguin Random House. In this episode, we discuss their backgrounds and ongoing work in the evolutionary dynamics and information theory of communication, how to stage a strong defense against disinformation, and the role of scientists and laypeople alike to help restore the reasoned discourse we all so desperately need.If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a recurring monthly donation at santafe.edu/give, or joining our Applied Complexity Network at santafe.edu/action. Also, please consider rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening! Related Links & Resources:CallingBullshit.orgCarl Bergstrom’s Website & Twitter.Jevin West’s Website & Twitter.Cost and conflict in animal signals and human languageby Michael Lachmann, Szabolcs Számadó, and Carl T. Bergstrom at PNASThe physical limits of communication or Why any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from noiseby Michael Lachmann, M.E.J. Newman, Cris Moore in The American Journal of PhysicsDeepfakes and the Epistemic Backstopby Regina Rini at Philosopher’s ImprintHunger Game: Is Honesty Between Animals Always the Best Policy?by Natalie Wolchover at Scientific AmericanPublic Editor by Goodly LabsVisit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Is there life on Mars? Or Titan? What are we even looking for? Without a formal definition, inquiries into the stars just echo noise. But then, perhaps, the noise contains a signal… To find life elsewhere in the universe requires us to wager a defined biology, to come to terms with what it means to be alive. Looking out is looking in, to ask the hardest question ever: How do we find something we might not recognize as what we’re seeking?Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and each week we’ll bring 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.This week we talk to SFI Program Postdoctoral Fellow Natalie Grefenstette, who works with SFI Professor Chris Kempes (whom we spoke to on Episode 17) on the multi-institution, NASA-funded Agnostic Biosignatures Project. Over the next hour we discuss how new approaches to astrobiological research may help science finally define the nature of living systems, and where and how to find them in the cosmos.For show notes, research links, transcripts, and more, visit complexity.simplecast.com.If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a recurring monthly donation at santafe.edu/give, or joining our Applied Complexity Network at santafe.edu/action. Also, please consider rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening!Natalie’s website:https://nataliegref.weebly.com/Natalie’s Google Scholar page:https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=fbHyA3IAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate"Adaptive properties of the genetically encoded amino acid alphabet are inherited from its subsets"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-47574-x.pdf"Agnostic Approaches to Extant Life Detection"https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lifeonmars2019/pdf/5026.pdf"Agnostic Polymer Detection Using Mass Spectrometry for Astrobiological Samples"https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2020/pdf/2706.pdf"Mars Extant Life: What's Next? Conference Report"https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2020.2237Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Guest Sara Imari Walker discusses the information theory of biology and origins of life. Topics include the relation between information, matter, and energy, the search for a fundamental understanding of life, the emergence of life on Earth, the role of information in defining life's principles, the challenges of reductionism in biology, self-replication theories, major transitions in biology linked to information processing, and the interconnectedness of life as a system from biology to AI.

Since the 1940s, scientists have puzzled over a curious finding: armed conflict data reveals that human battles obey a power-law distribution, like avalanches and epidemics.  Just like the fractal surfaces of mountains and cauliflowers, the shape of violence looks the same at any level of magnification. Beyond the particulars of why we fight, this pattern suggests a deep hidden order in the physical laws governing society.  And, digging into new analyses of data from both armed conflicts and voting patterns, complex systems researchers have started to identify the so-called “pivotal components” — the straw that breaks the camel’s back, the spark that sets a forest fire, the influential (but not always famous) figures that shape history.  Can science find a universal theory that predicts the size of conflicts from their initial conditions, or identifies key players whose “knobs” turn society in one direction or another?Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and each week we’ll bring 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.This week’s guest is SFI Program Postdoctoral Fellow Eddie Lee, whose work into “conflict avalanches” and swing voters gives a glimpse of the mysterious forces that determine why we fight — and how we may be able to prevent the next conflagration. In this episode, we talk about armed conflict as a fractal and a form of computation, swing voters in the justice system and influencers in pop culture, and what these studies have to say about the deep constraints that guide the currents of society.Just a note that this will be our last episode before a short summer break, to give our scientists uninterrupted time to work on a torrent of new research. We have some exciting episodes scheduled for our return in mid-August…in the meantime, please be sure to subscribe to Complexity Podcast on your favorite podcast provider to make sure you stay in the know! And if you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive, or join our Applied Complexity Network at santafe.edu/action.Lastly, we are excited to announce that submissions are open for this fall’s inaugural Complexity Interactive, a three-week online, project-based immersive course where you get a rare opportunity for mentorship by a large faculty of SFI professors — including Cris Moore, Melanie Mitchell, Simon DeDeo, Danielle Bassett, Luis Bettencourt, Melanie Moses, Ricard Solé, and many more. For more info and to apply, please visit https://santafe.edu/sfi-ciThank you for listening!Eddie Lee’s SFI Webpage & Google Scholar PagePapers we discuss in this episode:A scaling theory of armed conflict avalanchesSensitivity of collective outcomes identifies pivotal componentsEmergent regularities and scaling in armed conflict dataCollective memory in primate conflict implied by temporal scaling collapseGo further:Time Scales & Tradeoffs, an SFI Flash Workshop [video]Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInTranscript coming soon!  Thanks for your patience...

The magnitude of interlocking “wicked problems” we humans face today is daunting…and made all the worse by the widening schisms in our public discourse, the growing prominence of hate speech and prejudicial violence. How can we collaborate at scale if it’s not even safe to act as citizens, to participate in a sufficiently diverse society, without becoming targets? The World Wide Web has made it easier than ever for hate groups to organize…but also grants new power to those willing to oppose the hateful. New tactics such as “counter speech” have sprung up to depolarize society. But do they work? Can organized nonviolent interventions restore civility and save our public spaces? Or does the ensuing arms race only bring our fora closer to collapse?Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and each week we’ll bring 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.This week’s episode features three authors of new research on hate speech and counter speech — SFI Applied Complexity Fellow Joshua Garland, Professor Mirta Galesic, and External Professor Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi — who, along with co-authors Laurent Hébert Dufresne and Jean-Gabriel Young, have discovered patterns in the Twitter data that just might help save the Web. Over the next hour, we’ll discuss how they use AI to classify hate speech and counter speech, what this reveals about the hidden structure of our conversations, and how it offers hope for social media just when we need it most…To learn more about SFI's work on counter speech, and the new CounterBalance seminar series, please visit santafe.edu/counter.If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive, or joining our Applied Complexity Network at santafe.edu/action. Also, we hope you’ll help this show find new listeners by rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening!This Week’s Guests:Joshua GarlandMirta Galesic (who also appeared on this show for Episode 9)Keyan Ghazi-ZahediPapers we discuss in this episode:• Countering hate on social media: Large scale classification of hate and counter speech• As-yet-untitled follow-up paper TBA  (we will add this link as soon as it's available)Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Each of us at some point in our lives will face traumatizing hardship — abuse or injury, lack or loss. And all of us must weather the planetwide effects of this pandemic, economic instability, systemic inequality, and social unrest…and find a way to live on with their consequences. Trauma isn’t evenly distributed. But it IS ubiquitous, and learning how to get on with our lives is one of our main tasks as human beings. From this hardship grows the best of us: our wisdom, compassion, creativity, and service. By understanding the psychology and neuroscience of the body-mind’s response to trauma, we gain potent insight into how to “live with living without” — how to be both incomplete and whole. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and each week we’ll bring 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.This week’s guest is best-selling author and journalist Laurence Gonzales, a four-time SFI Miller Scholar whose writing has won widespread recognition, including the Montaigne Medal, two National Magazine Awards, two Eric Hoffer Awards, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. In this episode we talk about his book, Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience — and the lessons therein for those living in the wake of trauma.If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a recurring monthly donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive, or joining our Applied Complexity Network at santafe.edu/action. Also, please consider rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening!For more, visit Laurence’s Website & Bibliography.Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Cities define the modern world. They characterize the human era and its impacts on our planet. By bringing us together, these "social reactors" amplify the best in us: our creativity, efficiency, wealth, and communal ethos. But they also amplify our worst: the incidence of social crimes, the span of inequality, our vulnerability to epidemics. And built into the physics of the city is an accelerating cycle of crisis and innovation that now drives our global economy and ecosystems closer to the edge of existential peril. Many economists believe that open-ended growth and technological advances can save us from destruction, but the scaling laws that describe the evolution of the city seem to suggest the opposite: that we are on an ever-faster treadmill and can only jump to even faster treadmills, until our unchecked growth precipitates collapse. Are we on a super-exponential runway to abundance, or are we trapped in a kind of test of our ability to understand our constraints and steward our limited resources? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and each week we’ll bring 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.This week’s episode is part two of a two-part conversation with Geoffrey West, a physicist, Distinguished Shannan Professor and former President of the Santa Fe Institute.In part one we set the stage for a deep, difficult examination of our current complex crises by reviewing some key revelations from his book, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. In this week’s episode, we tackle the question of open-ended growth and whether complex systems science offers any insight into the design of a sustainable economy. Note that these episodes were taped before the murder of George Floyd, and now seem both strangely out-of-date and uncannily prophetic. Stay tuned in the weeks to come for conversations more directly touching on race, bias, inequality, polarization, counterspeech, and trauma, and follow us on social media for timely coverage of the science helping guide society toward fairer and saner outcomes.If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a recurring monthly donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive, or joining our Applied Complexity Network at santafe.edu/action. Also, please consider rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening!Further Listening & Reading:Geoffrey West’s Wikipedia & Google Scholar PagesScale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey WestCOMPLEXITY 04: Luis Bettencourt on The Science of CitiesCOMPLEXITY 10: Melanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & ComputationCOMPLEXITY 17: Chris Kempes on The Physical Constraints on Life & EvolutionVisit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn