COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
118 episodes - English - Latest episode: 15 days ago - ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsAre 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 Complexity podcast’s relaunch, we talk to researchers who have been exploring these questions and more through the lens of complexity science. Subscribe now and be part of the exploration!
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Episodes
Multiple worlds, containing multitudes
April 10, 2024 18:42 - 40 minutes - 37.4 MBGuests: Heather Graham, Research Associate at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Additional sound credits: Digifish music; “Determination of Azimuth,” written by Heather Graham, staged at the Baltimore Rock Opera Society Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn • Bluesky More info: Apply for the 2024 Complexity Global School at Universidad de los Andes in B...
How human history shapes scientific inquiry
March 27, 2024 20:54 - 33 minutes - 31 MBGuests: David Krakauer, President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute Sean Carroll, External Professor and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Additional sound credits: Digifishmusic, Trundlefly, Greenvwbeetle, Miksmusic, Brewlabboffin Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube...
Ep 4: The physics of collectives
March 13, 2024 19:47 - 33 minutes - 31.1 MBGuests: Melanie Moses, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Computer Science and Associate Professor of Biology at University of New Mexico Hyejin Youn, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Associate Professor at Institute of Northwestern University Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn • Bluesky More info: SFI programs: ...
Why is life so diverse?
February 28, 2024 21:59 - 29 minutes - 26.9 MBGuests: Brian Enquist, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Arizona Pablo Marquet, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor at Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Other music: Craig Smith, Justkiddink, MaestroALF, ComputerHotline, James Ro Davidson, Soun...
How do we identify life?
February 14, 2024 22:07 - 33 minutes - 31 MBGuests: Ricard Solé, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Head of the Complex Systems Lab at Universitat Pompeu Fabra Sara Walker, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Associate Director of the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Other music: Matucha, Kijjaz, Klankbeeld, Aesterial-Arts, Dijifishmusic, Greenvwbeetle, Odilon Marcenaro, Jobro, Benboncan, Bone...
What can physics tell us about ourselves?
January 31, 2024 21:27 - 34 minutes - 32 MBGuests: Vijay Balasubramanian, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania Geoffrey West, Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe Institute Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music: Mitch Mignano Other Music: Blue Dot Sessions, Pink House Music, Eardeer, and Craig Smith. Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn • Blu...
Relaunch of Complexity Podcast Trailer
January 29, 2024 22:53 - 3 minutes - 2.87 MBTrailer for Complexity: Physics of Life, from the Santa Fe Institute
Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park
June 30, 2023 17:16 - 1 hour - 91 MBEpisode Title and Show Notes: 106 - Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park Welcome to Complexity, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm Michael Garfield, producer of this show and host for the last 105 episodes. Since October, 2019, we have brought 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. Today I step down and ...
Mason Porter on Community Detection and Data Topology
April 05, 2023 17:12 - 1 hour - 75.4 MBOne way of looking at the world reveals it as an interference pattern of dynamic, ever-changing links — relationships that grow and break in nested groups of multilayer networks. Identity can be defined by informational exchange between one cluster of relationships and any other. A kind of music starts to make itself apparent in the avalanche of data and new analytical approaches that a century of innovation has availed us. But just as with new music genres, it requires a trained ear to attu...
Andrea Wulf on Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self
March 24, 2023 16:37 - 1 hour - 61.2 MBFor 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. And then, on wings of reason, Modern selves emerged to scrutinize these systems and at great cost swap them for others that more evenly distribute power and authority. Cosmic forces preordained one’s role within a transcendental order…but then, across quick decades of upheava...
Carlos Gershenson on Balance, Criticality, Antifragility, and The Philosophy of Complex Systems
March 09, 2023 23:56 - 1 hour - 61.1 MBHow 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 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 ...
Complex Conceptions of Time with David Krakauer, Ted Chiang, David Wolpert, & James Gleick
February 24, 2023 16:28 - 1 hour - 55.3 MBAnd 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 questions, psychological challenges, and engineering problems involved in humankind’s Great Work to extend its understanding and presence into outer space. For our third edition, we turned our attention to visionary projects living generations will likely not live to see comple...
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems with Value Metrics & Governance at Scale (EPE 06)
February 09, 2023 00:39 - 1 hour - 66.5 MBThere are maps, and there are territories, and humans frequently confuse the two. No matter how insistently this point has been made by cognitive neuroscience, epistemology, economics, and a score of other disciplines, one common human error is to act as if we know what we should measure, and that what we measure is what matters. But what we value doesn’t even always have a metric. And even reasonable proxies can distort our understanding of and behavior in the world we want to navigate. Eve...
Dani Bassett & Perry Zurn on The Neuroscience & Philosophy of Curious Minds
January 25, 2023 20:50 - 1 hour - 73.9 MBThis 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 wonder, exploration and discovery play out in both the brain and in society? How is scientific research like an amble through the woods? What juicy insights bubble up where neuroscientists, historians, philosophers, and mathematicians meet to answer questions like these? And ...
Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.
January 11, 2023 21:21 - 1 hour - 62.6 MBHumans 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? What were the evolutionary circumstances that led to our unique life history among the primates? What use is the undisciplined child brain with its tendencies to drift, scatter, and explore in a world that adults understand in such very different terms? And what can we transpo...
Ricard Solé on Liquid and Solid Brains and Terraforming The Biosphere
December 22, 2022 16:51 - 1 hour - 67 MBWhat does it mean to think? What are the traits of thinking systems that we could use to identify them? Different environmental variables call for different strategies in individual and collective cognition — what defines the threshold at which so-called “solid” brains transition into “liquids”? And how might we apply these and related lessons from ecology and evolution to help steward a diverse and thriving future with technology, and keep the biosphere afloat? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the o...
Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society (EPE 05)
December 10, 2022 01:02 - 1 hour - 71.3 MBIn 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 those systems upon reconstruction. Another way of putting this is that different disciplines reveal different truths at different scales. Contrary to long-held convictions that there would one day be one great unifying theory to explain it all, fundamental research in this ce...
John Krakauer Part 2: Learning, Curiosity, and Consciousness
November 23, 2022 21:24 - 49 minutes - 45 MBWhat makes us human? Over the last several decades, the once-vast island of human exceptionalism has lost significant ground to wave upon wave of research revealing cognition, emotion, problem-solving, and tool-use in other organisms. But there remains a clear sense that humans stand apart — evidenced by our unique capacity to overrun the planet and remake it in our image. What is unique about the human mind, and how might we engage this question rigorously through the lens of neuroscience?...
John Krakauer Part 1: Taking Multiple Perspectives on The Brain
November 11, 2022 16:20 - 51 minutes - 46.8 MBThe 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 it micro, macro, anatomical, behavioral — are destined to leave out crucial insights. What more, thinking “vertically” across scales, one might miss important angles from another discipline along the “horizontal” axis. For inquiries too big to sit within one field of knowledge,...
David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication
October 21, 2022 00:10 - 1 hour - 60.9 MBCommunication 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 the deepest known to science. There appear to be limits to the rate at which communication between two systems can happen…but the search for a fundamental relationship between speed, error, and energy (among other things) promises insights far deeper than merely whether we can k...
Kate Adamala on Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, and Bioethics
October 01, 2022 00:48 - 1 hour - 63.9 MBWhat 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 asking the wrong questions? Maybe life did not begin at all, but rather coalesced piecemeal, a set of properties contingent and convergent, plural, more than once? Maybe the origin of life is happening right now, just over the horizon, forming something new anew. Let’s get into...
Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Society
September 21, 2022 21:32 - 57 minutes - 52.6 MBOne 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 the noise of history and nature. This effort follows centuries of work to find the rules that structure language, music, and society. How strictly analogous are the patterns governing a symphony and those that describe a social transformation? Math and music are old friends, but new statistical and computational techniques afford the possibility o...
Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04)
September 02, 2022 21:54 - 1 hour - 65.2 MBAs 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 that wealthy special interests twist the rules so much it undermines the game itself. When economic power overtakes the processes of democratic governance, growth stagnates, and the rift between the rich and poor becomes abyssal. Desperate times and desperate measures jeopardize the fabric of society. How might nonpartisan approaches to this wi...
Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome
August 19, 2022 04:51 - 1 hour - 75.6 MBChances 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 sentiment among the smartphone-enabled human population is that we not only don’t own our data, but our data owns us — or, at least, the pressure of responsibility to keep providing data to the Internet and its devices (and the wider project of human knowledge construction) implic...
Daniel Lieberman on Evolution and Exercise: The Science of Human Endurace
August 03, 2022 19:05 - 52 minutes - 48.4 MBHuman 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 outdo most other terrestrial mammals in a contest of endurance. If we think about bodies as hypotheses about the stable features of their ancestral environments, what do the features of our unusual physiology say about what humans ARE, where we come from, the details of our ori...
Aviv Bergman on The Evolution of Robustness and Integrating The Disciplines
July 18, 2022 21:58 - 1 hour - 68.6 MBAsk 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 true in any evolutionary system. Most people seem to know “the butterfly effect” where tiny changes lead to large results, but the inverse also works: complex organisms buffer their development against adverse mutations so that tiny changes cannot redirect the growth of limbs an...
Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence
July 02, 2022 20:05 - 1 hour - 189 MBWhat 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 from a myriad of different angles, hard to reconcile. Whatever else one might identify as universal features of all living systems, most scholars would agree life is a physical phenomenon unfolding in time. And yet current physics is notorious for its inadequacy with respect to...
Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality
June 18, 2022 22:20 - 1 hour - 195 MBMath and music share their mystery and magic. Three notes, played together, make a chord whose properties could not be predicted from those of the separate notes. In the West, music theory and mathematics have common origins and a rich history of shaping and informing one another’s field of inquiry. And, curiously, Western composition has evolved over several hundred years in much the same way economies and agents in long-running simulations have: becoming measurably more complex; encoding m...
Seth Blumsack on Power Grids: Network Topology & Governance
June 04, 2022 16:49 - 1 hour - 155 MBWe 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. The physical infrastructure and the regulatory intricacies required to keep the lights on: both have grown organically, piecemeal, in complex networks that nobody seems to fully understand. And yet, we must. Compared to life 150 years ago, we are all utterly dependent on the ...
Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03)
May 21, 2022 16:25 - 1 hour - 185 MBAs our world knits together, economic interdependencies change in both shape and nature. Supply chains, finance, labor, technological innovation, and geography interact in puzzling nonlinear ways. Can we step back far enough and see clearly enough to make sense of these interactions? Can we map the landscape of capability across scales? And what insights emerge by layering networks of people, firms, states, markets, regions? We’re all riding a bucking horse; what questions can we ask to make...
Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02)
May 06, 2022 22:07 - 50 minutes - 116 MBIn 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 our world change if Big Tech operated on assumptions and incentives more aligned with the needs of a healthy society? Are more data — or are bigger models — really better? As human beings scamper around like prehistoric mammals under the proverbial feet of the new enormous digital monopolies that have emerged due to the Web’s economies of scale...
David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)
April 21, 2022 17:48 - 52 minutes - 48.5 MBThe 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 and act on what amounts to myth. Our predecessors can’t be faulted for their lack of data, but in 2022 we have superior resources we’re only starting to appreciate and use. In honor of the Santa Fe Institute’s new role as the hub of an international research network exploring...
C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems
April 08, 2022 01:41 - 1 hour - 68 MBContext is king: whether in language, ecology, culture, history, economics, or chemistry. One of the core teachings of complexity science is that nothing exists in isolation — especially when it comes to systems in which learning, memory, or emergent behaviors play a part. Even though this (paradoxically) limits the universality of scientific claims, it also lets us draw analogies between the context-dependency of one phenomenon and others: how protein folding shapes HIV evolution is meaning...
Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling
March 26, 2022 01:06 - 53 minutes - 49.1 MBAs fictional Santa Fe Institute chaos mathematician Ian Malcolm famously put it, “Life finds a way” — and this is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than by roots: seeking out every opportunity, improving in their ability to access and harness nutrients as they’ve evolved over the last 400 million years. Roots also exemplify another maxim for living systems: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” As the Earth’s climate has transformed, the plants and fungi have transformed along with i...
The Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles with Bryant Walker Smith
March 11, 2022 18:21 - 57 minutes - 52.2 MBAutonomous 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 into ever-sharper and more daunting focus. In 2022, even the most capable robotic cars aren’t self-determining agents but linked into swarms and acting as the tips of a vast and hidden web of design, programming, legislation, and commercial interest. Infrastructure is more tha...
Elizabeth Hobson on Animal Dominance Hierarchies
February 25, 2022 02:28 - 1 hour - 67.4 MBIrrespective 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 of individual that gathers information and adapts to its surroundings by encoding stable environmental features in the power relationships between its members. But what works for the society at large often results in violence and inequity for its members; as the founder of thi...
Hard Sci-Fi Worldbuilding, Robotics, Society, & Purpose with Gary Bengier
February 11, 2022 22:39 - 54 minutes - 49.7 MBAs 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, science fiction is a speculative world-building exercise that guides imagination and foresight by marrying the known with the unknown. The field is vast; some sci-fi writers pay less tribute to the line between the possible and the impossible. Others, though, adopt a far more sober tactic and write “hard” sci fi that does its best to stay within ...
Multiscale Crisis Response: Melanie Moses & Kathy Powers, Part 2
January 27, 2022 05:40 - 46 minutes - 42.2 MBCOVID has exposed and possibly amplified the polarization of society. What can we learn from taking a multiscale approach to crisis response? There are latencies in economies of scale, inequality of access and supply chain problems. The virus evolves faster than peer review. Science is politicized. But thinking across scales offers answers, insights, better questions… Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week...
Multi-scale Crisis Response: Melanie Moses & Kathy Powers, Part 2
January 27, 2022 05:40 - 46 minutes - 42.2 MBCOVID has exposed and possibly amplified the polarization of society. What can we learn from taking a multiscale approach to crisis response? There are latencies in economies of scale, inequality of access and supply chain problems. The virus evolves faster than peer review. Science is politicized. But thinking across scales offers answers, insights, better questions… Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week...
Fractal Inequality & The Complexity of Repair: Kathy Powers & Melanie Moses, Part 1
January 13, 2022 01:09 - 46 minutes - 42.2 MBSome 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 inquiry, one thing is certain: we are all embedded in, acting on, and being acted upon by the same nested networks. Our fates are intertwined, but our destinies diverge like weather forecasts, hingeing on small variations in contingency: the circumstances of our birth, the changing contexts of our lives. Seen through a complex systems science lens, ...
Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey West
December 22, 2021 02:48 - 1 hour - 64.9 MBIf 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, through which we can infer relationships and causes, but the pieces all keep shifting. One way to think about humankind’s response to COVID is as a collision between predictive power and understanding, highlighting how far the evolution of our comprehension has trailed behind the ev...
Tina Eliassi-Rad on Democracies as Complex Systems
December 13, 2021 20:51 - 58 minutes - 53.2 MBDemocracy is a quintessential complex system: citizens’ decisions shape each other’s in nonlinear and often unpredictable ways; the emergent institutions exert top-down regulation on the individuals and orgs that live together in a polity; feedback loops and tipping points abound. And so perhaps it comes as no surprise in our times of turbulence and risk that democratic processes are under extraordinary pressure from the unanticipated influences of digital communications media, rapidly evolv...
Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology
November 24, 2021 20:16 - 1 hour - 74.2 MBWhat 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” explanation varies from one person to another. Held in a kind of ecosystemic balance, these diverse approaches to seeking knowledge keep each other honest…but the use of one kind of knowledge to the exclusion of all others leads to disastrous results. And in the 21st Century, the dif...
Lauren Klein on Data Feminism (Part 2): Tracing Linguistic Innovation
November 05, 2021 18:47 - 33 minutes - 30.6 MBWhere does cultural innovation come from? Histories often simplify the complex, shared work of creation into tales of Great Men and their visionary genius — but ideas have precedents, and moments, and it takes two different kinds of person to have and to hype them. The popularity of “influencers” past and present obscures the collaborative social processes by which ideas are born and spread. What can new tools for the study of historical literature tell us about how languages evolve…and what...
Lauren Klein on Data Feminism (Part 1): Surfacing Invisible Labor
October 23, 2021 01:04 - 46 minutes - 42.3 MBWhen 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 should be, but a lament over the sorry state of western society’s fractured intellectual life. Over sixty years later the costs of this fragmentation are even more pronounced and dangerous. But advances in computing now make it possible for historians and engineers to speak in one another’s languages, catalyzing novel insights in each other’s h...
W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on "Prim Dreams of Order vs. Messy Vitality" in Economics, Math, and Physics
October 07, 2021 01:16 - 1 hour - 57.8 MBCan 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 lives, have people settled into using algebraic theory ill-suited to the task of capturing the fundamentally uncertain, open and evolving processes of innovation and exchange? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfi...
W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1)
September 24, 2021 00:30 - 51 minutes - 47.5 MBWhat 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 of objects. Why? The change has less to do with the objective nature of economies and more to do with what tools theorists had available. And scientific instruments — be they material technologies or concepts — don’t just make new things visible, but also hide things in new...
Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & Mathematics
September 08, 2021 22:32 - 1 hour - 58.9 MBWhether in an ecosystem, an economy, a jazz ensemble, or a lone scholar thinking through a problem, critical transitions — breakdowns and breakthroughs — appear to follow universal patterns. Creative leaps that take place in how mathematicians “think out loud” with body, chalk, and board look much like changes in the movement through “music-space” traced by groups of improvisers. Society itself appears to have an “aha moment” when a meme goes viral or a new word emerges in the popular vocabu...
Katherine Collins on Better Investing Through Biomimicry
August 14, 2021 15:11 - 1 hour - 60.8 MBWe 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 evolving world. And yet most people treat the world of finance as if it is somehow separate from the rest of life — including people who design the tools of finance, or who come up with economic theories. Many of the human world’s problems can be traced back to this fundamental erro...
Deborah Gordon on Ant Colonies as Distributed Computers
July 30, 2021 00:29 - 54 minutes - 49.7 MBThe 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 the case; rather than forming rigid castes, ants act like a distributed computer in which tasks are re-allocated as the situation changes. “Division of labor” implies a constant “assembly line” environment, not fluid adaptation to evolving conditions. But ants do not just “graduate” from one task to another as they age; they pivot to accept the...