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 & Context (language use). The organization has 558 authors who have published 4558 publications receiving 396015 citations. The organization is also known as: SFI.

The virtues and vices of equilibrium and the future of financial economics

Abstract: The use of equilibrium models in economics springs from the desire for parsimonious models of economic phenomena that take human reasoning into account. This approach has been the cornerstone of modern economic theory. We explain why this is so, extolling the virtues of equilibrium theory; then we present a critique and describe why this approach is inherently limited, and why economics needs to move in new directions if it is to continue to make progress. We stress that this shouldn't be a question of dogma, but should be resolved empirically. There are situations where equilibrium models provide useful predictions and there are situations where they can never provide useful predictions. There are also many situations where the jury is still out, i.e., where so far they fail to provide a good description of the world, but where proper extensions might change this. Our goal is to convince the skeptics that equilibrium models can be useful, but also to make traditional economists more aware of the limitations of equilibrium models. We sketch some alternative approaches and discuss why they should play an important role in future research in economics.

Context modulates signal meaning in primate communication

Abstract: A central issue in the evolution of social complexity and the evolution of communication concerns the capacity to communicate about increasingly abstract objects and concepts. Many animals can communicate about immediate behavior, but to date, none have been reported to communicate about behavior during future interactions. In this study, we show that a special, unidirectional, cost-free dominance-related signal used by monkeys (pigtailed macaques: Macaca nemestrina) means submission (immediate behavior) or subordination (pattern of behavior) depending on the context of usage. We hypothesize that to decrease receiver uncertainty that the signal object is subordination, senders shift contextual usage from the conflict context, where the signal evolved, to a peaceful one, in which submission is unwarranted. We predict and find that deceasing receiver uncertainty through peaceful signal exchange facilitates the development of higher quality social relationships: Individuals exchanging the peaceful variant groom and reconcile more frequently and fight less frequently than individuals exchanging signals only in the conflict context or no signals. We rule out alternative hypotheses, including an underlying reciprocity rule, temperament, and proximity effects. Our results suggest that primates can communicate about behavioral patterns when these concern relationship rules. The invention of signals decreasing uncertainty about relationship state is likely to have been critical for the evolution of social complexity and to the emergence of robust power structures that feed down to influence rapidly changing individual behavior.

Collapse of an ecological network in Ancient Egypt

Abstract: The dynamics of ecosystem collapse are fundamental to determining how and why biological communities change through time, as well as the potential effects of extinctions on ecosystems. Here, we integrate depictions of mammals from Egyptian antiquity with direct lines of paleontological and archeological evidence to infer local extinctions and community dynamics over a 6,000-y span. The unprecedented temporal resolution of this dataset enables examination of how the tandem effects of human population growth and climate change can disrupt mammalian communities. We show that the extinctions of mammals in Egypt were nonrandom and that destabilizing changes in community composition coincided with abrupt aridification events and the attendant collapses of some complex societies. We also show that the roles of species in a community can change over time and that persistence is predicted by measures of species sensitivity, a function of local dynamic stability. To our knowledge, our study is the first high-resolution analysis of the ecological impacts of environmental change on predator–prey networks over millennial timescales and sheds light on the historical events that have shaped modern animal communities.

Characterizing Species Interactions to Understand Press Perturbations: What Is the Community Matrix?

Abstract: The community matrix is among ecology's most important mathematical abstractions, formally encapsulating the interconnected network of effects that species have on one another's populations. Despite its importance, the term “community matrix” has been applied to multiple types of matrices that have differing interpretations. This has hindered the application of theory for understanding community structure and perturbation responses. Here, we clarify the correspondence and distinctions among the Interaction matrix, the Alpha matrix, and the Jacobian matrix, terms that are frequently used interchangeably as well as synonymously with the term “community matrix.” We illustrate how these matrices correspond to different ways of characterizing interaction strengths, how they permit insights regarding different types of press perturbations, and how these are related by a simple scaling relationship. Connections to additional interaction strength characterizations encapsulated by the Beta matrix, the Gamma matrix...