Emerging Syntheses in Science
Emerging Syntheses in Science
Santa Fe, October 1984. Many of the most accomplished creative minds in science—including four Nobel laureates—gather to create an institution unlike any other: where unconventional thinking flourishes and disciplinary boundaries fall away.
From this meeting emerged some of the most generative research programs of the last three decades, including the physics of living systems, the mathematics of society, quantitative archaeology, the nature of mind, fundamentals of complex systems theory—and the implications of all of these on the future. The original vision of a boundary-spanning research center became what Nature has called “that mecca of multidisciplinary complexity studies”: the Santa Fe Institute. This republished volume includes chapters from the scientific talks given at the founding meetings as well as never-before-published transcripts of the roundtable discussions.
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Editor
David Pines
Table of Contents
~ORIGINS~
Foreword: The Quest for a Complex Unity, David C. Krakauer and Geoffrey West
Preface: An Institution Without Fiefdoms, David Pines
1: The Concept of the Institute, Murray Gell-Mann
~PART I: A BEAUTIFUL POSSIBILITY~
2: Spin Glass Hamiltonians: A Bridge Between Biology, Statistical Mechanics and Computer Science, P. W. Anderson
3: Macromolecular Evolution: Dynamical Ordering in Sequence Space, Manfred Eigen
4: Evolutionary Theory of Genotypes and Phenotypes: Toward a Mathematical Synthesis, Marcus W. Feldman
5: Prospects for a Synthesis in the Human Behavioral Sciences, Irven DeVore
6: The Emergence of Evolutionary Psychology, John Tooby
7: War in Evolutionary Perspective, Richard W. Wrangham
8: The Relationship of Modern Archaeology to Other Disciplines, Douglas Schwartz
9: Reconstructing the Past Through Chemistry, Anthony Turkevich
~PART II: A FANTASTIC MANIPULATION~
10: The Conscious and Unconscious Stream of Thought, Jerome L. Singer
11: Conscious and Unconscious Processes, Mardi J. Horowitz
12: Brain Mechanisms Underlying Visual Hallucinations, J. D. Cowan
13: Solitons in Biological Molecules, Alwyn C. Scott
14: The New Biology and its Human Implications, Theodore T. Puck
15: Biomolecules, Hans Frauenfelder
~PART III: A GOOD MACHINE~
16: Computing With Attractors: From Self-Repairing Computers to Ultradiffusion and the Application of Dynamical Systems to Human Behavior, B. A. Huberman
17: Fundamental Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, Frank Wilczek
18: Complex Systems Theory, Stephen Wolfram
19: Mathematics and the Sciences, Felix E. Browder
20: Applications of Mathematics to Theoretical Computer Science, Harvey Friedman
21: Linguistics and Computing, M. P. Schützenberger
22: Dissipation, Information, Computational Complexity and the Definition of Organization, Charles H. Bennett
~PART IV: SOME DISTANT CRAG~
23: Plans for the Future, George A. Cowan
Afterword: My Part in an Origin Story—The Founding of the Santa Fe Institute, Stephen Wolfram
~APPENDIX~
Original Foreword to the 1988 Edition
Participants at the Founding Workshop
Agenda for the October 1984 Workshop
Transcripts of the Proceedings
The Aims of the Rio Grande Institute