Santa Fe Institute

About: Santa Fe Institute is a nonprofit organization based out in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Complex network. The organization has 558 authors who have published 4558 publications receiving 396015 citations. The organization is also known as: SFI.

The Tsimane Health and Life History Project: Integrating anthropology and biomedicine.

Abstract: The Tsimane Health and Life History Project, an integrated bio-behavioral study of the human life course, is designed to test competing hypotheses of human life-history evolution. One aim is to understand the bidirectional connections between life history and social behavior in a high-fertility, kin-based context lacking amenities of modern urban life (e.g. sanitation, banks, electricity). Another aim is to understand how a high pathogen burden influences health and well-being during development and adulthood. A third aim addresses how modernization shapes human life histories and sociality. Here we outline the project's goals, history, and main findings since its inception in 2002. We reflect on the implications of current findings and highlight the need for more coordinated ethnographic and biomedical study of contemporary nonindustrial populations to address broad questions that can situate evolutionary anthropology in a key position within the social and life sciences.

Gene duplications, robustness and evolutionary innovations.

Abstract: Mutational robustness facilitates evolutionary innovations. Gene duplications are unique kinds of mutations, in that they generally increase such robustness. The frequent association of gene duplications in regulatory networks with evolutionary innovation is thus a special case of a general mechanism linking innovation to robustness. The potential power of this mechanism to promote evolutionary innovations on large time scales is illustrated here with several examples. These include the role of gene duplications in the vertebrate radiation, flowering plant evolution and heart development, which encompass some of the most striking innovations in the evolution of life.

Response to Clarke and Fraser: effects of temperature on metabolic rate

Abstract: In two recent papers, Clarke and Fraser (2004) and Clarke (2004) discussed the empirical data and the mechanistic processes relating metabolic rate to temperature. They criticized the framework proposed recently by Gillooly et al . (2001) and presented an alternative evolutionary trade-off hypothesis. Gillooly et al . (2001) (see also West, Brown and Enquist 1997; Gillooly et al . 2002; Charnov and Gillooly 2003; Brown et al . 2004a,b) developed a theory for the scaling of metabolic rate that combines the effects of two primary variables, body size and temperature, based on first principles of physics, chemistry and biology – including the fitnessmaximizing dynamic of natural selection. This leads to a single equation for whole-organism metabolic rate, B :