Krakauer is an evolutionary biologist and president of the renowned Santa Fe Institute (SFI), which has an almost mythical status among scientists as 'a playground for geniuses'. As a professor of complex systems, he explores the 'evolution of intelligence and stupidity on earth'.

The scientists at the Santa Fe Institute are not affiliated with traditional faculties, thus ensuring that good ideas are not overlooked.

What makes the SFI so special?

"Years ago I wrote a piece about the mountain, the monastery and the metropolis. It was about what people need to be able to think well. You need a certain degree of isolation (a mountain), a certain community (a monastery) and a place where you can present your ideas (a city). At SFI we try to be a kind of monastery in the mountains, a place where you can have subversive thoughts within a community that is open to them.”

"It started with a group of very learned people who hired independently thinking individuals to arrive at a grand unified theory of everything. Totally unsuccessful, in my opinion. But what was interesting was that utopian enthusiasm. We now study living systems at every scale, from cell to body, from society to universe. What began as an attempt to understand the purposeless universe through physics developed into an attempt to understand living systems.”

How do these two systems relate to each other?

"Science is obsessed with patterns. And the universe has regular patterns that you can describe mathematically in a beautiful, elegant and compact way. The foundation of this is symmetry. This is the aesthetics of minimalism, of Mondrian as it were. You see this reflected in physics and to some extent also in chemistry.

"But the living world? That's a mess. The living universe breaks that symmetry and thereby weakens the power of minimalist aesthetics. Something has been added that you must qualify. The entire evolution of life on earth is a long series of broken symmetries; they are a kind of 'frozen accidents'. And they don't go away, but they persist. Take the structure of DNA, or the sequence of bases in DNA, that's a long series of frozen accidents.”

“A faculty or a discipline doesn't provide the right structure”

In what way does SFI connect research fields in the study of living systems?

"In Gestalt theory there is a distinction between figure and ground. A figure is something in the physical world and the ground is the underlying mechanism. In most scientific disciplines, the figure is the starting point. You then study, for example, a part of the brain or a certain microbe. But we turn it around. We don't start from the figure, but from the ground. Take a concept like information or energy. If you investigate that, and then look for case studies in the physical world, then you can talk to many more people. Information plays a role in the brain, but also in large language models, for example.”

How do universities deal with such connections?

"This kind of science has institutional implications. A faculty or a discipline no longer provides the right structure for this. In fact: the faculty is a stumbling block. You can spend all your time convincing people that they should collaborate. But I don't like the language of interdisciplinarity. For me this implies a Lego model of science. It says: here are the Lego blocks, now go glue them together and build a nice castle. As if it's about a combination of what already exists. The new thing is not a combination of Lego blocks at all, maybe it's not even a block. We therefore work without faculties or departments."

At university you can advance your career faster by becoming a specialist. Does this also mean that the scientific process itself must be adapted?

"It depends on what you consider the scientific process. In my view, it's about a systematic way of strengthening curiosity, experimentation and verification. Essentially, it's what a child does every day. A bit enhanced perhaps, but not much. So I don't think it's about the scientific process that needs to be adapted, but about the institutionalization and professionalization of the scientific process.

"In stochastics [a mathematical theory] you use the terms 'explore' and 'exploit'. Exploit has gotten a negative connotation, but this is the idea: You explore by looking around you; you survey an entire landscape as it were. When you then discover what you want to investigate further, then you go dig there, the exploiting. You dig and dig until you hit groundwater.

"In science we have found all the places where we think we want to dig. But now we spend almost all our time just digging. We've started digging in physics, in literature, in chemistry, in geography. All important. But meanwhile we hardly explore anymore. We don't go looking for other possible places. But what if there's water in those other places? I think we're leaving many good ideas unexplored.”

In this society, it also does not pay to be a generalist...

"No, the language itself is already a problem. Maybe a generalist is a specialist in a field that doesn't yet exist or isn't yet recognized. Generalists are rather pioneers, but for various reasons they are quickly locked into a specialty. At university you can advance your career faster by becoming a specialist. When Darwin and Wallace conceived the theory of evolution, were they generalists then? No, their field simply didn't exist yet."

Author: Sanne Bloemink. Published in NRC on May 27, 2024. Translated by the Institute for Advanced Study.