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 atom, then the quark, and yet these great discoveries don’t answer age-old questions about life, intelligence, or language, innovation, ecosystems, or economies.
So people learned a new trick – not just taking things apart but studying how things organize themselves, without a plan, in ways that cannot be predicted. A new field, complex systems science, sprang up to explain and navigate a world beyond control.
At the same time, improvements in computer processing enabled yet another method for exploring irreducible complexity: we learned to instrumentalize the evolutionary process, forging machine intelligences that can correlate unthinkable amounts of data. And the Internet’s explosive growth empowered science at scale, in networks and with resources we could not have imagined in the 1900s. Now there are different kinds of science, for different kinds of problems, and none of them give us the kind of easy answers we were hoping for.
This is a daring new adventure of discovery for anyone prepared to jettison the comfortable categories that served us for so long. Our biggest questions and most wicked problems call for a unique and planet-wide community of thinkers, willing to work on massive and synthetic puzzles at the intersection of biology and economics, chemistry and social science, physics and cognitive neuroscience.
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Kate Adamala on Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, and Bioethics
Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Society
Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04)
Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome
Daniel Lieberman on Evolution and Exercise: The Science of Human Endurace
Aviv Bergman on The Evolution of Robustness and Integrating The Disciplines
Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence
Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality
Seth Blumsack on Power Grids: Network Topology & Governance
Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03)
Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02)
David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)
C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems
Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling
The Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles with Bryant Walker Smith
Elizabeth Hobson on Animal Dominance Hierarchies
Hard Sci-Fi Worldbuilding, Robotics, Society, & Purpose with Gary Bengier
Multiscale Crisis Response: Melanie Moses & Kathy Powers, Part 2
Fractal Inequality & The Complexity of Repair: Kathy Powers & Melanie Moses, Part 1
Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey West
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