Krakauer is an evolutionary biologist and the president of the renowned Santa Fe Institute (SFI), which holds 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 the piece Mountains, Monasteries, and the Metropolis. It was about what people need in order to think well. You need a certain degree of isolation (a mountain), a particular community (a monastery), and a place where you can present your ideas (a city). At SFI, we try to be a sort 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 highly educated people, who employed independent thinkers to develop a grand unified theory of everything. Totally unsuccessful, in my opinion. But that utopian enthusiasm was interesting. We now study living systems on every scale, from cell to body, from society to universe. What began as an attempt to understand the meaningless universe through physics has developed into an attempt to understand living systems.”

“At the university, you can advance your career more quickly by becoming a specialist.”

How do these two systems relate to each other?

“Science is obsessed with patterns. 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, analogous to Mondrian. 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 is added that you need to 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; they persist. Take the structure of DNA or the sequence of bases in DNA; that is a long series of frozen accidents.”

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 study, for example, a part of the brain or a particular microbe. But we reverse it. We do not start from the figure, but from the ground. Take a concept like information or energy. If you study that, and then look for case studies in the physical world, you can talk to many more people. For example, information plays a role in the brain, but also in large language models.”

How do universities deal with such connections?

“This type of science has institutional implications. A faculty or a discipline no longer provides the right structure for it. In fact, the faculty is a stumbling block. You can spend all your time convincing people to collaborate. But I don't like the language of interdisciplinarity. To me, it's a Lego model of science. It says: here are the Lego bricks, now glue them together and build a nice castle. As if it's about combining what already exists. The new thing isn't a combination of Lego bricks at all, maybe it's not even a brick. That's why we work without faculties or departments.”

Does this also mean that the scientific process itself needs to be adjusted?

“It depends on what you consider the scientific process. In my view, it's a systematic way of enhancing curiosity, experimenting, and verification. Essentially, it's what a child does every day. Perhaps a bit amplified, but not much. So, I don't think it's the scientific process that needs adjusting, but rather the institutionalization and professionalization of the scientific process.”

“A faculty or a discipline does not provide the right structure.”

“In statistics, you use the terms ‘explore’ and ‘exploit’. Exploitation has acquired a negative connotation, but this is the idea. Exploration is done by looking around; you survey a whole landscape, so to speak. When you discover what you want to investigate further, then you start digging, exploiting it. 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 have started digging in physics, in literature, in chemistry, in geography. All very important. But meanwhile, we hardly explore anymore. We do not look for other possible places. But what if those other places have groundwater? I think we are missing out on a lot of good ideas.”

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

“No, the language itself is already a problem. Perhaps a generalist is a specialist in a field that does not yet exist or is not yet recognised. Generalists are more like pioneers, but for various reasons, they quickly get locked into a specialization. At university, you can advance your career more quickly by becoming a specialist. When Darwin and Wallace developed the theory of evolution, were they generalists? No, their field simply did not exist yet.”

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