Cover art for podcast COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

113 EpisodesProduced by Santa Fe InstituteWebsite

Are there universal laws of life and can we find them? Is there a physics of society, of ecology, of evolution? Join us for six episodes of thought-provoking insights on the physics of life and its profound implications on our understanding of the universe. In this season of the Santa Fe Institute’s… read more

113 Episodes | 2019 - 2024

Farewell

February 22nd, 2024

0:39

An important message from RadioPublic

How human history shapes scientific inquiry

March 27th, 2024

33:53

Guests: 

  • David Krakauer, President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute
  • Sean Carroll, External Professor and …

Ep 4: The physics of collectives

March 13th, 2024

33:58

Guests: 

  • Melanie Moses, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Computer Science and Associate Professor of Biology at University …

Why is life so diverse?

February 28th, 2024

29:22

Guests: 

  • Brian Enquist, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Arizona
  • Pablo …

How do we identify life?

February 14th, 2024

33:50

Guests: 

  • Ricard Solé, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Head of the Complex Systems Lab at Universitat Pompeu Fabra
  • Sara Walker, External …

What can physics tell us about ourselves?

January 31st, 2024

34:55

Guests: 

  • Vijay Balasubramanian, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics at the University of …

Relaunch of Complexity Podcast Trailer

January 29th, 2024

3:08

Trailer for Complexity: Physics of Life, from the Santa Fe Institute

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

June 30th, 2023

1:39:24

Episode Title and Show Notes:

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

Welcome to Complexity, the …

Mason Porter on Community Detection and Data Topology

April 5th, 2023

1:22:19

One way of looking at the world reveals it as an interference pattern of dynamic, ever-changing links — relationships that grow and break in nested …

Andrea Wulf on Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self

March 24th, 2023

1:06:49

For centuries, Medieval life in Europe meant a world determined and prescribed by church and royalty. The social sphere was very much a pyramid, and everybody had to answer to and fit within the schemes of those on top. …

Carlos Gershenson on Balance, Criticality, Antifragility, and The Philosophy of Complex Systems

March 9th, 2023

1:06:41

How do we get a handle on complex systems thinking? What are the implications of this science for philosophy, and where does philosophical tradition foreshadow findings from the scientific frontier?

Welcome …

Complex Conceptions of Time with David Krakauer, Ted Chiang, David Wolpert, & James Gleick

February 24th, 2023

1:00:21

And now for something completely different!  Last October, The Santa Fe Institute held its third InterPlanetary Festival at SITE Santa Fe, celebrating the immensely long time horizon, deep scientific and philosophical …

Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems with Value Metrics & Governance at Scale (EPE 06)

February 9th, 2023

1:12:36

There are maps, and there are territories, and humans frequently confuse the two. No matter how insistently this point has been made by cognitive …

Dani Bassett & Perry Zurn on The Neuroscience & Philosophy of Curious Minds

January 25th, 2023

1:20:46

This is a podcast by and for the curious — and yet, in over three years, we have pointed curiosity at nearly every topic but itself. What is it, anyway? Are there worse and better frames for understanding how desire and …

Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.

January 11th, 2023

1:08:19

Humans have an unusually long childhood — and an unusually long elderhood past the age of reproductive activity. Why do we spend so much time playing and exploring, caregiving and reflecting, learning and transmitting? …

Ricard Solé on Liquid and Solid Brains and Terraforming The Biosphere

December 22nd, 2022

1:13:09

What does it mean to think? What are the traits of thinking systems that we could use to identify them? Different environmental variables call for …

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society (EPE 05)

December 10th, 2022

1:17:55

In his foundational 1972 paper “More Is Different,” physicist Phil Anderson made the case that reducing the objects of scientific study to their smallest components does not allow researchers to predict the behaviors of …

John Krakauer Part 2: Learning, Curiosity, and Consciousness

November 23rd, 2022

49:09

What makes us human?  Over the last several decades, the once-vast island of human exceptionalism has lost significant ground to wave upon wave of …

John Krakauer Part 1: Taking Multiple Perspectives on The Brain

November 11th, 2022

51:05

The brain is arguably one of the most complex objects known to science. How best to understand it? That is a trick question: brains are organized at many levels and attempts to grasp them all through one approach — be …

David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication

October 21st, 2022

1:06:29

Communication is a physical process. It’s common sense that sending and receiving intelligible messages takes work…but how much work? The question of the relationship between energy, information, and matter is one of …

Kate Adamala on Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, and Bioethics

October 1st, 2022

1:09:45

What does it mean to be alive? Our origins are the horizon of our understanding, and as with the physical horizon, our approach brings us no closer. The more we learn, the more mysterious it all becomes. What if we’re …

Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Society

September 21st, 2022

57:24

One way to frame the science of complexity is as a revelation of the hidden order under seemingly separate phenomena — a teasing-out of music from …

Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04)

September 2nd, 2022

1:11:13

As the old nut goes, “To the victor goes the spoils.” But if each round of play consolidates the spoils into fewer hands, eventually it comes to pass …

Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome

August 19th, 2022

1:22:35

Chances are you’re listening to this on an advanced computer that fits in your pocket, but is really just one tentacle tip of a giant, planet-spanning architecture for the gathering and processing of data. A common …

Daniel Lieberman on Evolution and Exercise: The Science of Human Endurace

August 3rd, 2022

52:50

Human beings are distinctly weird. We live for a very long time after we stop reproducing, move completely differently than all of our closest relatives, lack the power of chimpanzees and other primates but completely …

Aviv Bergman on The Evolution of Robustness and Integrating The Disciplines

July 18th, 2022

1:14:58

Ask any martial artist: It’s not just where a person strikes you but your stance that matters. The amplitude and angle of a blow is one thing but how you can absorb and/or deflect it makes the difference. The same is …

Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence

July 2nd, 2022

1:22:23

What is life, and where does it come from? These are two of the deepest, most vexing, and persistent questions in science, and their enduring mystery and allure is complicated by the fact that scientists approach them …

Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality

June 18th, 2022

1:25:16

Math and music share their mystery and magic. Three notes, played together, make a chord whose properties could not be predicted from those of the …

Seth Blumsack on Power Grids: Network Topology & Governance

June 4th, 2022

1:07:48

We lead our lives largely unaware of the immense effort required to support them. All of us grew up inside the so-called “Grid” — actually one of many interconnected regional power grids that electrify our modern world. …

Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03)

May 21st, 2022

1:20:49

As our world knits together, economic interdependencies change in both shape and nature. Supply chains, finance, labor, technological innovation, and …

Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02)

May 6th, 2022

50:42

In the digital era, data is practically the air we breathe. So why does everybody treat it like a product to be hoarded and sold at profit? How would …

David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)

April 21st, 2022

52:57

The world is unfair — but how much of that unfairness is inevitable, and how much is just contingency? After centuries of efforts to arrive at formal theories of history, society, and economics, most of us still believe …

C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems

April 8th, 2022

1:14:17

Context is king: whether in language, ecology, culture, history, economics, or chemistry. One of the core teachings of complexity science is that …

Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling

March 26th, 2022

53:36

As fictional Santa Fe Institute chaos mathematician Ian Malcolm famously put it, “Life finds a way” — and this is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated …

The Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles with Bryant Walker Smith

March 11th, 2022

57:01

Autonomous vehicles hardly live up to their name. The goal of true “driverlessness” was originally hyped in the 1930s but keeps getting kicked further and further into the future as the true complexity of driving comes …

Elizabeth Hobson on Animal Dominance Hierarchies

February 25th, 2022

1:13:37

Irrespective of your values, if you’re listening to this, you live in a pecking order. Dominance hierarchies, as they’re called by animal behaviorists, define the lives of social creatures. The society itself is a kind …

Hard Sci-Fi Worldbuilding, Robotics, Society, & Purpose with Gary Bengier

February 11th, 2022

54:18

As a careful study of the world, science is reflective and reactive — it constrains our flights of fancy, anchors us in hard-won fact. By contrast, …

Multiscale Crisis Response: Melanie Moses & Kathy Powers, Part 2

January 27th, 2022

46:07

COVID has exposed and possibly amplified the polarization of society. What can we learn from taking a multiscale approach to crisis response? There …

Fractal Inequality & The Complexity of Repair: Kathy Powers & Melanie Moses, Part 1

January 13th, 2022

46:03

Some people say we’re all in the same boat; others say no, but we’re all in the same storm. Wherever you choose to focus the granularity of your …

Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey West

December 22nd, 2021

1:10:52

If you’re honest with yourself, you’re likely asking of the last two years: What happened? The COVID-19 pandemic is a prism through which our stories and predictions have refracted…or perhaps it’s a kaleidoscope, …

Tina Eliassi-Rad on Democracies as Complex Systems

December 13th, 2021

58:03

Democracy is a quintessential complex system: citizens’ decisions shape each other’s in nonlinear and often unpredictable ways; the emergent …

Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology

November 24th, 2021

1:21:03

What makes a satisfying explanation? Understanding and prediction are two different goals at odds with one another — think fundamental physics versus artificial neural networks — and even what defines a “simple” …

Lauren Klein on Data Feminism (Part 2): Tracing Linguistic Innovation

November 5th, 2021

33:23

Where does cultural innovation come from? Histories often simplify the complex, shared work of creation into tales of Great Men and their visionary …

Lauren Klein on Data Feminism (Part 1): Surfacing Invisible Labor

October 23rd, 2021

46:10

When British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow described the sciences and humanities as “two cultures” in 1959, it wasn’t a statement of what could or …

W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on "Prim Dreams of Order vs. Messy Vitality" in Economics, Math, and Physics

October 7th, 2021

1:03:09

Can you write a novel using only nouns? Well, maybe…but it won’t be very good, nor easy, nor will it tell a story. Verbs link events, allow for narrative, communicate becoming. So why, in telling stories of our economic …

W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1)

September 24th, 2021

51:56

What is the economy?  People used to tell stories about the exchange of goods and services in terms of flows and processes — but over the last few hundred years, economic theory veered toward measuring discrete amounts …

Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & Mathematics

September 8th, 2021

1:04:19

Whether in an ecosystem, an economy, a jazz ensemble, or a lone scholar thinking through a problem, critical transitions — breakdowns and …

Katherine Collins on Better Investing Through Biomimicry

August 14th, 2021

1:06:28

We are all investors: we all make choices, all the time, about our allocation of time, calories, attention… Even our bodies, our behavior and anatomy, represent investment in specific strategies for navigating an …

Deborah Gordon on Ant Colonies as Distributed Computers

July 30th, 2021

54:15

The popular conception of ants is that “anatomy is destiny”: an ant’s body type determines its role in the colony, for once and ever. But this is not …

Reconstructing Ancient Superhighways with Stefani Crabtree and Devin White

July 16th, 2021

1:06:01

Seventy thousand years ago, humans migrated on foot across the ancient continent of Sahul — the landmass that has since split up into  Australia and …

Mark Ritchie on A New Thermodynamics of Biochemistry, Part 2

July 1st, 2021

45:48

This week we conclude our two-part discussion with ecologist Mark Ritchie of Syracuse University on how he and his SFI collaborators are starting to …

Mark Ritchie on A New Thermodynamics of Biochemistry, Part 1

June 17th, 2021

40:45

Deep inside your cells, the chemistry of life is hard at work to make the raw materials and channel the energy required for growth, maintenance, and reproduction. Few systems are as intricate or as mysterious. For this …

Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 2: Humboldt's Dangerous Idea

June 4th, 2021

48:54

The 19th Century saw many transformations: the origins of ecology and modern climatology, new unifying theories of the living world, the first Big …

Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt's Naturegemälde

May 21st, 2021

51:08

When you hear the word “nature,” what comes to mind? Chances are, if you are listening to this in the 21st Century, the image is one of a vast, interconnected, living network — one in which you and your fellow human …

Sidney Redner on Statistics and Everyday Life

May 7th, 2021

57:59

Complexity is all around us: in the paths we walk through pathless woods, the strategies we use to park our cars, the dynamics of an elevator as it cycles up and down a building. Zoom out far enough and the phenomena of …

Orit Peleg on the Collective Behavior of Honeybees & Fireflies

April 23rd, 2021

1:00:58

“More than the sum of its parts” is practically the slogan of systems thinking. One canonical example is a beehive: individually, a honeybee is not that clever, but together they can function like shapeshifting …

Jonas Dalege on The Physics of Attitudes & Beliefs

April 8th, 2021

47:40

Human relationships are often described in the language of “chemistry” — does that make the beliefs and attitudes of individuals a kind of “physics”? …

J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution

March 26th, 2021

1:04:00

Once upon a time at UC Santa Cruz, a group of renegade grad students started mixing physics with math and computers, determined to discover underlying patterns in the seeming-randomness of systems like the weather and …

James Evans on Social Computing and Diversity by Design

March 12th, 2021

1:00:11

In the 21st Century, science is a team sport played by humans and computers, both. Social science in particular is in the midst of a transition from …

David Stork on AI Art History

February 26th, 2021

1:00:23

Art history is a lot like archaeology — we here in the present day get artifacts and records, but the gaps between them are enormous, and the …

Alien Crash Site Invades Complexity: Tamara van der Does on Sci-Fi Science, with Guest Co-host Caitlin McShea

February 12th, 2021

50:08

The consequence of living in a complex world: one tiny tweak can lead to massive transformation. Set the stage a slightly different way, and the

Mark Moffett on Canopy Biology & The Human Swarm

January 29th, 2021

1:12:05

Most maps of the world render landscapes in 2D — yet wherever we observe ecosystems, they stratify into a third dimension. The same geometries that describe the dizzying diversity of species in the canopies of forests …

Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice & The Physics of Inference

January 15th, 2021

1:11:40

It’s tempting to believe that people can outsource decisions to machines — that algorithms are objective, and it’s easier and fairer to dump the burden on them. But convenience conceals the complicated truth: when lives …

Science in The Time of COVID: Michael Lachmann & Sam Scarpino on Lessons from The Pandemic

December 23rd, 2020

59:14

COVID-19 hasn’t just disrupted the “normal” of everyone’s social practices in what we take for granted as “daily life.” The pandemic has also, more …

Artemy Kolchinsky on "Semantic Information" & The Physics of Meaning

December 11th, 2020

1:01:51

Matter, energy, and information: the holy trinity of physics. Understanding the relations between these measures of our world are one of the big …

Peter Dodds on Text-Based Timeline Analysis & New Instruments for The Science of Stories

November 26th, 2020

1:30:23

"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
– Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

When human beings saw the first pictures of the Earth from space, the impact was transformative. New instruments …

Scott Ortman on Archaeological Synthesis and Settlement Scaling Theory

November 11th, 2020

54:54

The modern world has a way of distancing itself from everything that came before it…and yet the evidence from archaeology supports a different story. …

Helena Miton on Cultural Evolution in Music and Writing Systems

October 29th, 2020

1:01:44

Organisms aren’t the only products of the evolutionary process. Cultural products such as writing, art, and music also undergo change over time, …

David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific Method

October 14th, 2020

52:13

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 …

Introducing Alien Crash Site, a new SFI Podcast with host Caitlin McShea

October 9th, 2020

20:32

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 …

Vicky Yang & Henrik Olsson on Political Polling & Polarization: How We Make Decisions & Identities

September 30th, 2020

1:10:09

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 …

Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West on Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World

September 16th, 2020

58:44

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 …

Natalie Grefenstette on Agnostic Biosignature Detection

September 2nd, 2020

56:52

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 …

The Information Theory of Biology & Origins of Life with Sara Imari Walker (Big Biology Podcast Crossover)

August 12th, 2020

1:06:51

One of the defining characteristics of complex systems science is the shift in emphasis from objects to relationships and processes. How is …

Fractal Conflicts & Swing Voters with Eddie Lee

July 23rd, 2020

1:02:35

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 …

Fighting Hate Speech with AI & Social Science (with Joshua Garland, Mirta Galesic, and Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi)

July 15th, 2020

1:05:48

The magnitude of interlocking “wicked problems” we humans face today is daunting…and made all the worse by the widening schisms in our public …

The Art & Science of Resilience in the Wake of Trauma with Laurence Gonzales

July 6th, 2020

59:23

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 …

Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)

June 25th, 2020

58:18

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 …

Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)

June 17th, 2020

49:30

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 …

Better Scientific Modeling for Ecological & Social Justice with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 7)

June 8th, 2020

40:03

Mathematical models of the world — be they in physics, economics, epidemiology — capture only details that researchers notice and deem salient. …

The Future of the Human Climate Niche with Tim Kohler & Marten Scheffer

June 2nd, 2020

56:35

Humans, like any other organism, occupy a niche — a “Goldilocks Zone” for which our biology is suited, relatively to the extreme diversity of …

Exponentials, Economics, and Ecology with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 6)

May 11th, 2020

47:28

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 …

Embracing Complexity for Systemic Interventions with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 5)

May 4th, 2020

44:55

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 …

Rethinking Our Assumptions During the COVID-19 Crisis with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 4)

April 27th, 2020

51:13

COVID-19 has delivered an extraordinary shock to our assumptions, be they in how we practice education, business, research, or governance. When we …

On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 3)

April 20th, 2020

44:11

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 …

Caroline Buckee on Improving COVID-19 Surveillance & Response

April 17th, 2020

45:05

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 …

COVID-19 & Complex Time in Biology & Economics with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 2)

April 13th, 2020

42:21

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 …

Rigorous Uncertainty: Science During COVID-19 with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 1)

April 6th, 2020

47:04

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 …

Sam Scarpino on Modeling Disease Transmission & Interventions

April 1st, 2020

28:32

“We should not have a strategy that involves killing a sizable percentage of the population. But, even if you were going to get over that ethical …

Laurent Hébert-Dufresne on Halting the Spread of COVID-19

March 26th, 2020

49:14

Chances are, if you are listening to this around the time it was released, you’re listening alone. Right now the human species is conducting one of the most sweeping synchronized experiments of all time: physical …

Andy Dobson on Epidemic Modeling for COVID-19

March 19th, 2020

36:14

Pandemics like the current novel coronavirus disease outbreak provide a powerful incentive to study the dynamics of complex adaptive systems. They …

Nicole Creanza on Cultural Evolution in Humans & Songbirds

March 12th, 2020

1:06:19

One feature common to nonlinear phenomena is how they challenge intuitions. Maybe nowhere is this more apparent than in studying the evolutionary …

Melanie Mitchell on Artificial Intelligence: What We Still Don't Know

March 5th, 2020

1:17:16

Since the term was coined in 1956, artificial intelligence has been a kind of mirror that tells us more about our theories of intelligence, and our …

Albert Kao on Animal Sociality & Collective Computation

February 27th, 2020

52:38

Over one hundred years ago, Sir Francis Galton asked 787 villagers to guess an ox’s weight. None of them got it right, but averaging the answers led to a near-perfect estimate. This is a textbook case of the so-called …

David B. Kinney on the Philosophy of Science

February 20th, 2020

55:43

Science is often seen as a pure, objective discipline — as if it all rests neatly on cause and effect. As if the universe acknowledges a difference …

Kirell Benzi on Data Art & The Future of Science Communication

February 13th, 2020

1:06:06

Science has always been about improving human understanding of our universe…but scientists have not always prioritized accessibility of their …

Chris Kempes on The Physical Constraints on Life & Evolution

February 6th, 2020

1:02:22

Why is the internal structure of Bacteria so different from the architecture of a nucleated cell? Why do some kinds of organisms stay small, whereas …

Andy Dobson on Disease Ecology & Conservation Strategy

January 30th, 2020

59:12

Physics usually gets the credit for grand unifying theories and the search for universal laws…but looking past the arbitrary boundaries between the …

R. Maria del-Rio Chanona on Modeling Labor Markets & Tech Unemployment

January 23rd, 2020

50:06

Since the first Industrial Revolution, most people have responded in one of two ways to the threat of technological unemployment: either a general …

W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on The Future of The Economy

January 15th, 2020

1:00:49

If the economy is better understood as an evolving system, an out-of-equilibrium ecology composed of agents that adapt to one another’s strategies, …

W. Brian Arthur (Part 1) on The History of Complexity Economics

January 8th, 2020

57:03

From its beginnings as a discipline nearly 150 years ago, economics rested on assumptions that don’t hold up when studied in the present day. The …

Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks

December 18th, 2019

1:05:47

It may be a cliché, but it’s a timeless truth regardless: who you know matters. The connectedness of actors in a network tells us not just who wields the power in societies and markets, but also how new information …

Ray Monk on The Lives of Extraordinary Individuals: Wittgenstein, Russell, Oppenheimer

December 11th, 2019

50:13

In this show’s first episode, David Krakauer explained how art and science live along an axis of explanatory depth: science strives to find the simplest adequate abstractions to explain the world we observe, where art’s …

Melanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & Computation

December 4th, 2019

1:06:12

What is the difference between 100 kilograms of human being and 100 kilograms of algae? One answer to this question is the veins and arteries that carry nutrients throughout the human body, allowing for the intricate …

Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making

November 27th, 2019

1:19:23

We live in a world so complicated and immense it challenges our comparably simple minds to even know which information we should use to make …

Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary History

November 20th, 2019

1:04:17

It’s easy to take modern Earth for granted — our breathable atmosphere, the delicately balanced ecosystems we depend on — but this world is nothing …

Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice

November 13th, 2019

59:39

Whether or not you think you hold them, stereotypes shape the lives of everyone on Earth. As human beings, we lack the ability to judge each …

Jennifer Dunne on Reconstructing Ancient Food Webs

November 6th, 2019

48:05

Looking back through time, the fossil record shows a remarkable diversity of forms, creatures unfamiliar to today’s Earth, suggesting ecosystems alien enough to challenge any sense of continuity. But reconstructed …

Jennifer Dunne on Food Webs & ArchaeoEcology

October 30th, 2019

46:24

For as long as humans have erected walls around our cities, we’ve considered culture separate from the encircling wilderness. This difference came to …

Luis Bettencourt on The Science of Cities

October 23rd, 2019

50:17

If you’re a human in this century, the odds are overwhelming that you are a city-dweller. These hubs of human cultural activity exert a powerful …

Sabine Hauert on Swarming Across Scales

October 16th, 2019

39:23

If complex systems science had a mascot, it might be the murmuration. These enormous flocks of starlings darken skies across the northern hemisphere, performing intricate airborne maneuvers with no central leadership or …

The Origins of Life: David Krakauer, Sarah Maurer, and Chris Kempes at InterPlanetary Festival 2019

October 9th, 2019

55:37

A few years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, upsetting centuries of certainty about the history of life, he wrote a now-famous letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker, British botanist and advocate of …

David Krakauer on The Landscape of 21st Century Science

October 9th, 2019

46:32

For 300 years, the dream of science was to understand the world by chopping it up into pieces. But boiling everything down to basic parts does not tell us about the way those parts behave together. Physicists found the …

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Listen to COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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