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

Daepp, M. I. G.,Hamilton, M. J.,West, G. B.,Bettencourt, L. M. A. The firm is a fundamental economic unit of contemporary human societies. Studies on the general quantitative and statistical character ...

Themes are institute-wide research topics that draw together large networks of researchers from the extended SFI network and beyond. Over the course of several years, researchers rigorously engage ...

We are creating dynamic models for understanding why some human societies are more unequal than others. From relatively egalitarian foragers to modern agricultural societies, we are investigating the ...

Emergence is a universal phenomenon that can be defined mathematically in a very general way. This is useful for the study of scientifically legitimate explanations of complex systems, here defined as ...

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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, ...

Societies today face daunting challenges: population growth, rapid urbanization, ecological and environmental disturbances, and an unpredictable global marketplace. To address these complex and ...

We are building a theoretical framework that will guide the creation of artificial agents that adjust their neural networks (brains) to feedback from their bodies and surroundings -- in essence to ...

Leigh Van Valen was an American evolutionary biologist who made major contributions to evolutionary theory and is particularly remembered by his groundbreaking paper "A New Evolutionary Law" (1973) ...

We conjecture that adaptive systems are characterized by a self-referential loop in which combinatorial objects encode functions that act back on these objects. A model for this loop is presented. It ...