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knowledge defies entropy
NEW RELEASE:
The Economy as an Evolving Complex System IV
The Complex World, originally published in Volume 1 of Foundational Papers in Complexity Science, presents an entirely new framing of nature, of the human role in the natural and technological worlds, and what it means to prosper on a living planet.
We live in a complex world—meaning one that is increasingly connected, evolving, technological, volatile, and potentially poised for catastrophe. And yet we continue to treat the world as if it were simple: linear, unchanging, disconnected, and infinitely exploitable.
Complexity science is an approach to understanding and surviving in a complex world. In this concise and comprehensive introduction, Santa Fe Institute President David C. Krakauer traces the roots of complexity science back to the nineteenth-century science of machines—evolved and engineered—into the twentieth-century science of emergent systems.
By combining insights from evolution, computation, nonlinear dynamics, and statistical physics, complexity science provides the first scientific framework for understanding the purposeful universe.
Foundational Papers in Complexity Science presents the first unified charting of the full territory of complexity science—an essential resource for navigating the modern world.
This project maps the development of complex-systems science through eighty-nine revolutionary works originally published between 1922 and 2000. Curated by SFI President David C. Krakauer, each seminal paper is introduced and placed into its historical context, with enduring insights discussed by leading contemporary complexity scientists.
These four volumes are a product of collective intelligence. More than a compilation, Foundational Papers represents large-scale collaboration within the SFI community—brilliant thinkers who have contextualized the work that shaped their own research, resulting in a sparkling demonstration of how complexity shatters the usual scientific divisions and a look back at the path we’ve followed in order to gain a clearer view of what lies ahead.
Volume I spans the turbulent years from 1922 to 1962. Across several decades of war, runaway technological invention, and economic upheaval, complexity science emerges through the integration of ideas from evolution, computation, dynamics, and statistical physics.
Volume 2 examines the utopian–dystopian years from 1962 to 1973: a decade of global instability, social revolution, space exploration, and growing ecological awareness. Complexity science challenges our understanding of prediction, control, and uncertainty.
Volume 3 describes the maturing of complexity science in the age of democratized computing. Mini-computers and personal computers supporting computer graphics, simulation environments, and numerical mathematics, intersect with nonlinear dynamics, evolutionary theory, and statistical physics. This culminates in new models and theories—from autopoiesis to synergetics, cellular automata to agent-based models—and their many applications, including ecological resilience, complex materials, the origin of life, and climate dynamics.
Volume 4 marks the era of the global internet, ubiquitous computing, and multiple network revolutions. As complexity science matures, unifying frameworks emerge, including connectionism, scaling theory, new models and theories of transmission and contagion, and various forms of biologically inspired computing. The application of mechanisms of decentralized knowledge production to society and culture transforms our understanding of socio-economic and cultural systems.
Humans are the ultimate complex systems. In this monograph intended for psychologists and social scientists interested in modeling psychological processes, Han L. J. van der Maas argues that we can only succeed in exploring the psychological system by understanding its complexity. By applying the tools of complexity science to psychology, researchers and practitioners can achieve desperately needed breakthroughs in the social sciences.
The book has three primary objectives: to provide a comprehensive overview of complex-systems research, with a particular emphasis on its applications in psychology and the social sciences; to provide skills for complex-systems research; and to foster critical thinking regarding the potential applications of complex systems in psychology. Readers should have a basic understanding of mathematics and knowledge of the programming language R.
Complex-Systems Research in Psychology explores a range of topics, including chaos, bifurcation, and self-organization in psychological processes, psychological network analysis, as well as agent-based modeling of social processes. It offers applications in various areas of psychology, such as perception, depression, addiction, cognitive development, and polarization.
The electronic version of this volume is freely available and can be viewed at:
https://santafeinstitute.github.io/ComplexPsych/
Acclaimed science writer George Johnson brings his formidable reporting skills to the first biography of Nobel Prize-winner Murray Gell-Mann, the brilliant, irascible man who revolutionized modern particle physics with his models of the quark and the Eightfold Way.
Beautifully balanced in its portrayal of an extraordinary and difficult man, interpreting the concepts of advanced physics with scrupulous clarity and simplicity, Strange Beauty is a tour de force of both science writing and biography. This updated edition, with a new foreword by Douglas Hofstadter, includes reflections on the final years of Gell-Mann’s life and his influence on the Santa Fe Institute.
The Santa Fe Institute celebrates one of its founders with a new edition of a seminal work by the late Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann. Originally published in 1994, The Quark & the Jaguar spans the simple and the complex, examining the relationship between the fundamental laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world. Neither autobiography nor scientific treatise, this uniquely personal and unifying vision reflects Gell-Mann’s broad expertise, curiosity, and passion for topics as disparate as archaeology, linguistics, child development, and computers.
The specter of information is haunting sciences. With these words, Wojciech H. Zurek invited fellow scientists to attend the 1989 Santa Fe Institute workshop on which this proceedings volume is based. Thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, the quantum theory of measurement, the physics of computation, dynamical systems, molecular biology, and computer science — information remains central to the 32 essays collected in this new edition of Complexity, Entropy & the Physics of Information.
Like the original meeting, this two-volume reprint explores the connections between quantum and classical physics, information and its transfer, computation, and their significance for the formulation of physical theories. A newly written introduction from attendee Seth Lloyd contextualizes the significance of this record of a meeting that marked the intersection of information, physics, complexity, and computation.
If we could rewind the tape of the Earth’s deep history back to the beginning and start the world anew—would social behavior arise yet again?
While the study of origins is foundational to many scientific fields, such as physics and biology, it has rarely been pursued in the social sciences. Yet knowledge of something’s origins often gives us new insights into the present.
In Ex Machina, John H. Miller introduces a methodology for exploring systems of adaptive, interacting, choice-making agents, and uses this approach to identify conditions sufficient for the emergence of social behavior. Miller combines ideas from biology, computation, game theory, and the social sciences to evolve a set of interacting automata from asocial to social behavior.
Readers will learn how systems of simple adaptive agents—seemingly locked into an asocial morass—can be rapidly transformed into a bountiful social world driven only by a series of small evolutionary changes. Such unexpected revolutions by evolution may provide an important clue to the emergence of social life.
COVID-19 is the virus that proved the fragility of the world. It took only the simplest form of life to shake the connectivity and dependency of society. This book is a real-time record and recommendation from a community of complexity scientists reacting to the pandemic. Through nontechnical articles, interviews, and discussions spanning the early days of the pandemic through the fall of 2021, researchers seek ways to stay responsive to complexity when every force conspires toward simplicity. The Complex Alternative encompasses immunology, epidemiology, psychology, inequality, and collapse. It is an effort to preserve perspective at a time when partiality seeks dominion.
Edited by David C. Krakauer and Geoffrey West, this book features the thoughts of more than sixty members of the Santa Fe Institute’s research community on the future of complexity science and the broader significance of science in the twenty-first century.
To fully understand not only the past, but also the trajectories, of human societies, we need a more dynamic view of human social systems. Agent-based modeling (ABM), which can create fine-scale models of behavior over time and space, may reveal important, general patterns of human activity. Agent-Based Modeling for Archaeology is the first ABM textbook designed for researchers studying the human past. Appropriate for scholars from archaeology, the digital humanities, and other social sciences, this book offers novices and more experienced ABM researchers a modular approach to learning ABM and using it effectively.
Readers will find the necessary background, discussion of modeling techniques and traps, references, and algorithms to use ABM in their own work. They will also find engaging examples of how other scholars have applied ABM, ranging from the study of the intercontinental migration pathways of early hominins, to the weather–crop–population cycles of the American Southwest, to the trade networks of Ancient Rome. This textbook provides the foundations needed to simulate the complexity of past human societies, offering researchers a richer understanding of the past—and likely future—of our species.
The contemporary global economy exhibits unprecedented structural complexity—characterized by nonlinear dynamics, adaptive behaviors, and emergent properties. Understanding these phenomena requires theoretical frameworks capable of addressing complexity, path dependence, and evolutionary processes.
Complexity economics has developed to address such intellectual challenges. Originating in a seminal 1987 Santa Fe Institute workshop and first described in The Economy as an Evolving Complex System (1988), this approach fundamentally reconceptualizes economic systems as complex adaptive systems. Subsequent volumes (1997, 2005) progressively developed this framework, offering new insights into finance, technological innovation, and social interactions.
Like each of its predecessors, this fourth volume is the product of an interdisciplinary workshop hosted at the Santa Fe Institute. It represents the latest synthesis, reflecting theoretical advances and methodological developments achieved over nearly four decades. Drawing on contributions from leading scholars worldwide, the chapters span foundational questions to policy applications—from agent-based modeling and network theory to macroeconomic dynamics, innovation systems, sustainability transitions, and inequality.
The result demonstrates complexity economics' capacity to generate novel insights into phenomena that remain puzzling within traditional frameworks: financial instability, technological disruption, climate economics, and institutional change. This volume positions complexity economics as an essential analytical framework for understanding twenty-first-century economic realities.