We’re living through a unique moment in history. The interlocking crises of a global pandemic, widespread unemployment, social unrest, and climate change, show us just how far human civilization has traveled along a path that leads to collapse. It is more crucial than ever to seek a deeper understanding of the systems that sustain us, and the thin layer of life on the surface of our planet. What are the underlying laws that govern how we live together and as individuals? How do our economies and cities grow? How are the human and non-human worlds related? And can we solve the problems we’ve created when we’re quarantined from one another?By identifying the basic cardiovascular and nervous systems of human societies, we may one day be able to cure some of the complex diseases of civilization and found a new, sustainable mode of existence.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 one of a two-part conversation with Geoffrey West, a physicist,  Distinguished Shannan Professor, and former president of the Santa Fe Institute.In it we set the stage for a deep, difficult examination of the existential threats we’re facing 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 next 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 Note that these episodes were taped before the murder of George Floyd, and now seem both strangely out-of-date and uncannily prophetic.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 one-time or recurring monthly donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive … and/or 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

Mathematical models of the world — be they in physics, economics, epidemiology — capture only details that researchers notice and deem salient. Rather than objective claims about reality, they encode (and thus enact) our blind spots. And the externalities created by those models — microscopic pathogens invisible to the naked eye, or differences in the social network structures of two neighborhoods, or food webs disrupted by urban development — have a way of biting back when we ignore them. Structural inequality created by an insufficient model jeopardizes not just the ones left off the map, but the entire systems in which they participate. Science fiction author Philip K. Dick put it well when we said that “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Ultimately, ecological and social justice is dependent on our rigorous empiricism and our dedication to describing all the relevant dimensions of our complex world.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.In this episode, Santa Fe Institute President David Krakauer returns to talk about the latest essays in SFI Transmission series, to shed light on the crucial under-examined margins of our maps — and how good science both enables and demands us to do better.If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a one-time or recurring monthly donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive … and/or consider rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening!Read the essays we discuss in this episode:David Krakauer and Dan Rockmore on out-evolving COVID-19Jon Machta on the noisy equilibrium of disease containment & economic painBrian Enquist on how pandemics rapidly reshape the evolutionary & ecological landscapeMelanie Moses and Kathy Powers on models that protect the vulnerableVisit 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 • LinkedInMentioned in this episode:Melanie Moses, Kathy Powers, Brian Enquist, Jon Machta, Dan Rockmore, David Krakauer, Michael Garfield, Edgar Allan Poe, Auguste Dupin, Dan Brown, Vera Rubin, Kent Ford, Fritz Zwicky, Robert Koch, Martinus Beijerinck, Charles Darwin, Jennifer Doudna, CRISPR, Cory Doctorow, Peter Singer, William Hamilton, Lauren Ancel Meyers, Caroline Buckee, David B. Kinney, Kurt Wiesenfeld, Chao Tang, Per Bak, Cris Moore, Sidney Redner, Manfred Laubichler, William Gibson, François de Liocourt, Andrey Kolmogorov, Geoffrey West, Andy Dobson, Jessica Flack, Steve Lansing, Nicolas Rashevsky, Darcy Wentworth Thompson, Mahzarin Banaji

Humans, like any other organism, occupy a niche — a “Goldilocks Zone” for which our biology is suited, relatively to the extreme diversity of habitats on Earth. But to understand the natural habitat of human beings we would first have to perform a comprehensive survey of human settlements throughout history and prehistory, looking for patterns in the climate data. No one did this research until very recently, and what they found surprised them. Human life, especially the outdoor work like farming on which our societies depend, is suited only to a very narrow band of temperature and moisture levels, a tiny area on Earth’s large surface. The implications are severe and ominous when held in light of climate forecasts for the coming decades: a major and unprecedented set of challenges that will test ability to innovate, adapt, and migrate as the world around us changes.This week guest’s are SFI ecologist Marten Scheffer at Wageningen University and SFI archaeologist Tim Kohler at Washington State University. In this episode, we discuss the past and future human climate niche, how our ability to adapt to climate change is hampered by the psychology of sunk costs, and how a better understanding of social tipping points and collective information processing at the scale of civilization could help prevent the catastrophes ensured by business as usual.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.If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a one-time or recurring monthly donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive … and/or consider rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening!Papers discussed in this episode:Future of the human climate nicheSunk cost effects and vulnerability to collapse in ancient societiesSocial norms as solutionsScale and information processing thresholdsTim Kohler’s WebsiteMarten Scheffer’s WebsiteVisit 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

If COVID-19 has made anything obvious to everyone, it might be how the very small can force the transformation of the very large. Disrupt the right place in a network and exponential changes ripple outward: a virus causes a disease that leads to economic shocks and other social impacts that, in turn, re-open urban spaces to nonhuman animals and change the course of evolution.Adapting to these changes will require a different kind of understanding: one of nonlinear dynamics, feedback loops, extended selves, and the tiered and interwoven ecological and economic systems of our planet. By studying the processes and structures that this change exposes, we’re offered a new way of seeing individuality-in-context…and, perhaps, new mechanisms for aligning individual and public good, the human and the wild.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.In Transmission, SFI’s new essay series on COVID-19, our community of scientists shares a myriad of complex systems insights on this unprecedented situation. This special supplementary mini-series with SFI President David Krakauer finds the links between these articles—on everything from evolutionary theory to economics, epistemology to epidemiology—to trace the patterns of a deeper order that, until this year, was largely hidden in plain sight.If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a one-time or recurring monthly donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive … and/or consider rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening!Further Reading:Chris Kempes and Geoffrey West on understanding cities to respond to pandemicsEric Maskin on mechanism design for the marketPamela Yeh and Ian MacGregor-Fors on studying wildlife in empty citiesSidney Redner on exponential growth processesDavid Wolpert on SARS-CoV-2 and Landauer's boundWhat is an individual? Information Theory may provide an answerVisit 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 • LinkedInMentioned in this episode:David Wolpert, Alan Turing, Rolf Landauer, Timothy Morton, Buckminster Fuller, Sidney Redner, Chris Kempes, Geoffrey West, Bill Gates, Ann Pendleton-Jullian, Luis Bettencourt, Cris Moore, Eric Maskin, Wendy Carlin, Sam Bowles, Kenneth Arrow, John Von Neumann, Eric Morgenstern, John Nash, Pamela Yeh, Ian MacGregor-Fors, Alan Weisman, Doug Erwin

It takes effort to embrace complexity. Simple models, simple narratives seem easier up front, their consequences only obvious in retrospect. When we talk about COVID-19 transmission rates, we’re using averages that do not offer crucial insights into how those rates may vary. When we target complex ailments with silver-bullet pharmaceuticals, we don’t address the underlying systems-level problems. Radical uncertainty resists attempts at easy answers, forcing changes in the pace at which we take shots in the dark. Sometimes, as with infection testing, we can’t seem to take shots fast enough.But understanding systems helps identify good points of intervention, to find the keystone species for a conservation strategy or draw from history the most instructive lessons for today. Understanding human motivation can help us gamify the exercise we need to stave off frailty, and secondary illnesses. A small up-front investment in understanding our society as multi-scale and networked can prevent enormous economic costs.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.In Transmission, SFI’s new essay series on COVID-19, our community of scientists shares a myriad of complex systems insights on this unprecedented situation. This special supplementary mini-series with SFI President David Krakauer finds the links between these articles—on everything from evolutionary theory to economics, epistemology to epidemiology—to trace the patterns of a deeper order that, until this year, was largely hidden in plain sight.If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a one-time or recurring monthly donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive … and/or consider rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening!Further Reading:John Krakauer and Michelle Carlson on COVID and Spiraling Frailty SyndromeStefani Crabtree on What History Can Teach Us About ResilienceVan Savage on The Informational Pitfalls of Selective TestingDavid Tuckett, Lenny Smith, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Jürgen Jost on Making Good Decisions Under UncertaintyCristopher Moore on The Heavy Tail of OutbreaksJoin 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

COVID-19 has delivered an extraordinary shock to our assumptions, be they in how we practice education, business, research, or governance. When we base forecasts on bad data, even solid logic gives us unreliable results. Centralized authority is good for organized coherent action but isn’t agile or fine-grained enough to deal with local variance and rapidly evolving novel challenges. Surveillance can save lives but also threatens privacy upon which a diverse society depends. A longer memory might cost more to maintain, but also save more by preventing even larger economic burdens down the road.How we adapt to this pandemic will depend on where we find new balance points between established and efficient universal standards and agile, messy flexibility. In this episode, we build on the themes of earlier installments to study five new articles where rigorous uncertainty, complex time, and the creative opportunities of crisis intersect…Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute, the world’s foremost complex systems science research center. 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.In Transmission, SFI’s new essay series on COVID-19, our community of scientists shares a myriad of complex systems insights on this unprecedented situation. This special supplementary mini-series with SFI President David Krakauer finds the links between these articles—on everything from evolutionary theory to economics, epistemology to epidemiology—to trace the patterns of a deeper order that, until this year, was largely hidden in plain sight.Support our research and communication efforts at santafe.edu/give.If you find the information in this program useful, please consider leaving a review at Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening!Further Reading:Anthony Eagan on Federalism in a time of pandemicCarrie Cowan on the future of educationStephanie Forrest on privacy concerns that arise with a pandemicSidney Redner on quantitative ways to consider the economic impact of COVID-19David Wolpert on statistical tools for making pandemic predictionsVisit 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

Our histories constrain what opportunities we notice and can take in life. The genes you have define the shape your body can grow into, in concert with environmental influences. But the cards you’re dealt don’t tell you how to play your hand; for that, you have to know which game you’re playing.  Natural selection acts through the relationships between an organism and ecology, a business and economy.  What works in one environment may fail in others. The rub is that the rules are set by the collective action of all players, so the game keeps changing as the players change: disruptions shift the so-called “fitness landscape,” opening new possibilities, reallocating fortune.Creation and destruction, then, are two sides of the same coin: The deeper a crisis, the bigger the opportunity.  Too much opportunity precipitates a crisis. A mass extinction or a market crash can be both the effect and cause of major innovations. In these punctuations, our strategies for navigating stable worlds don’t work. Amidst catastrophe, survival hinges on evolvability. What organisms, policies, and practices will rule the post-coronavirus world? To answer this, we need to ask two further questions:“What will the new rules be?” and “Who is already suited for this brave new world, or flexible enough to turn and face the strange?”Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute, the world’s foremost complex systems science research center. 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.In Transmission, SFI’s new essay series on COVID-19, our community of scientists shares a myriad of complex systems insights on this unprecedented situation. This special supplementary mini-series with SFI President David Krakauer finds the links between these articles—on everything from evolutionary theory to economics, epistemology to epidemiology—to trace the patterns of a deeper order that, until this year, was largely hidden in plain sight.If you find the information in this program useful, please consider leaving a review at Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening!Further Reading:Bill Miller on Investment Strategies in Times of CrisisSantiago Elena on a Complex Systems Perspective of VirusesManfred Laublichler on How Every Crisis is an OpportunityMirta Galesica & Henrik Olsson on Opportunities for Science CommunicatorsDoug Erwin on Not Letting A Good Crisis Go To WasteVisit 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

For this special mini-series covering the COVID19 pandemic, we will bring you into conversation with the scientists studying the bigger picture of this crisis, so you can learn their cutting-edge approaches and what sense they make of our evolving global situation.This week’s guest is Caroline Buckee, formerly an SFI Omidyar Fellow, one of MIT Tech Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35, and a CNN Top 10: Thinker — now Associate Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard School of Public Health. In this episode, we discuss the myriad challenges involved in monitoring and preventing the spread of epidemics like COVID-19, from the ethical concerns of high-resolution mobility data to an academic research ecosystem ill-equipped for rapid response, and the uneven distribution of international science funding.If you find the information in this program useful, please consider leaving a review at Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening!Further Reading:Caroline’s Website at Harvard and Twitter Page.Find the papers we discuss in this episode at Caroline’s Google Scholar Page.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

In several key respects, COVID-19 reveals how crucial timing is for human life. The lens of complex systems science helps us understand the central role of time in coordinating across scales, and how synchrony or misalignment leads to major consequences—whether it’s in how the metabolic differences between bats and humans can create an opportunity for interspecies epidemics, or in how the timing of society’s return to work could either help reboot or help destroy the world economy. Network research shows us early warning signs of an impending social crisis, the fossils of a vast collective computation as we struggle to adapt to periods of rapid change…and even the analogies we use to talk about these times bely a nested and embodied structure in how we encode the details of reality. These are complex times, indeed—and how civilization mutates to adapt to this pandemic will have everything to do with our ability to think and act at multiple timescales, simultaneously.In Transmission, SFI’s new essay series on COVID-19, our community of scientists shares a myriad of complex systems insights on this unprecedented situation. This special supplementary mini-series with SFI President David Krakauer finds the links between these articles—on everything from evolutionary theory to economics, epistemology to epidemiology—to trace the patterns of a deeper order that, until this year, was largely hidden in plain sight.You can support our research and communication efforts at santafe.edu/give.If you find the information in this program useful, please consider leaving a review at Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening!Further Reading:005: Andrew Dobson on the Need for Disease Models which Capture Key Complexities of Transmission006: Miguel Fuentes on Using Social Media Data to Detect Signatures of Global Crises007 Danielle Allen, E. Glen Weyl, and Rajiv Sethi on How to Reduce COVID-19 Mortality While Easing Economic Decline008: Michael Hochberg on the Importance of Timing in Restrictive Confinement009: Melanie Mitchell on How the Analogies We Live by Shape our ThoughtsVisit 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

The coronavirus pandemic is in one sense a kind of prism: it reveals the many interlocking systems that, until disrupted, formed the mostly invisible backdrop of modern life, challenging the economy and our models of the world at the same time that it threatens individual and social health. The virus acts on, and invites new understanding through, the complexity we only take for granted at our peril. In SFI’s new essay series on the crisis, Transmission, our international community of scientists explores a spectrum of perspectives on COVID-19 to share a myriad of complex systems insights on our unprecedented situation. In this special supplementary mini-series with SFI President David Krakauer, we discuss and find the links between these articles—on everything from evolutionary theory to economics, epistemology to epidemiology—to trace the patterns of a deeper order that, until this year, was largely hidden in plain sight.Read the Transmission series articles we discuss in this episode:000: David Krakauer on Citizen-Based Medicine001: David Kinney on Why Scientists Must Make Value Judgments in a Complex Crisis002: Luu Hoang Duc and Jürgen Jost on Making the Most of Bad Data003: John Harte on Reducing Conflicting Advice on Allowable Group Size004: Simon DeDeo on Thinking out of EquilibriumVisit 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