It certainly wasn’t planned, but our decision to relocate to Santa Fe earlier this year combining with many years of work that included overlapping interests with SFI, several shared relationships, and the ‘invisible hand’ of chance all apparently had something to do with my attending this year’s annual conference at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). I’m glad I was able to attend for a number of reasons.

The conference celebrated a convergence of related events in time — 25th anniversary of SFI, with a theme of evolution in a nod to the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin (Feb 12, 1809), but the underlying theme and lecture by the conference organizer — David Krakauer, chair of faculty — was the evolution of evolutionary theory, and I would add semantics of evolution (meaning), which is where the conference debate itself evolved by the end. Today’s use of the word ‘evolution’ seems to be limitless, although no other English word seems appropriate to describe a similar process in economics, sociology, technology, etc. etc. etc. One can certainly argue that everything man caused is by extension evolutionary, as we are biological life forms, but it doesn’t do much good when drilling down for learning. Among the lectures for this two + day conference were: Darwin and Turing (Daniel Dennett), Malaria (Caroline Buckee), agent based paradigm (Robert Axtell), Conflict (Jessica Flack), 2009 response to the H1N1 pandemic (Laureen Ancel Meyers), evolution of evolutionary theory (David Krakauer), web engineering (Graham Spencer – Google), evolution of human languages (Murray Gell-Mann), and a group led by J. Doyne Farmer on whether economics is a branch of evolutionary theory, or something else entirely. Read More