Medieval friar William of Ockham posited a famous idea: always pick the simplest explanation. Often referred to as the ...

We present a gene-culture coevolutionary model for brother-sister mating in the human. It is shown that cultural--as opposed to innate--determination of mate preference may evolve, provided the ...

Novelty in biological, social, and technological systems provides the variety on which evolutionary processes act. But how does newness— both advantageous and unsuccessful — arise in the first place, ...

A historical archive of SFI's in-house preprint series, retired in 2017.

Accumulating observational evidence suggests an intimate connection between rapidly expanding insect populations, deforestation, and global climate change. We review the evidence, emphasizing the ...

Complex Systems Summer School (CSSS) offers an intensive four-week introduction to complex behavior in mathematical, physical, living, and social systems. CSSS brings together graduate students, ...

The SFI Undergraduate Complexity Research (UCR) program is a 10-week residential experience in complexity science research. Students can select from a menu of projects, or develop a project in ...

We discuss the extent to which recent improvements in our understanding of inherently nonlinear phenomena present challenges to the use of mathematical models in the analysis of environmental and ...

The Santa Fe Institute was founded in 1984 by a group of scientists frustrated with the narrow disciplinary confines of academia. They wanted to tackle big questions that spanned different fields, and ...

Questions remain on the effectiveness of different proposals for battery electric vehicle (BEV) charging and other supporting infrastructure. Here we investigate options for charging BEVs and ...

We develop a unifying approach for complexity measures, based on the principle that complexity requires interactions at different scales of description. Complex systems are more than the sum of their ...

We describe in detail a new and highly effcient algorithm for studying site or bond percolation on any lattice. The algorithm can measure an observable quantity in a percolation system for all values ...