More information about the session and how to submit: https://alifeforscience.github.io
Scaling laws for function diversity and specialization across socioeconomic and biological complex systems
Vicky Chuqiao Yang, James Holehouse, Hyejin Youn, JosΓ© Ignacio Arroyo, Sidney Redner, Geoffrey B. West, and Christopher P. Kempes
PNAS 123 (7) e2509729123
Diversification and specialization are central to complex adaptive systems, yet overarching principles across domains remain elusive. We introduce a general theory that unifies diversity and specialization across disparate systems, including microbes, federal agencies, companies, universities, and cities, characterized by two key parameters. We show from extensive data that function diversity scales with system size as a sublinear power law-resembling Heapsβ law-in all but cities, where it is logarithmic. Our theory explains both behaviors and suggests that function creation depends on system goals and structure: federal agencies tend to ensure functional coverage; cities slow new function growth as old ones expand, and cells occupy an intermediate position. Once functions are introduced, their growth follows a remarkably universal pattern across all systems.
Read the full article at: www.pnas.org
AI agents are βaeroplanes for the mindβ: five ways to ensure that scientists are responsible pilots
Dashun Wang
As artificial-intelligence systems take on more of the scientific workflow, the central goal should not be complete automation, but designing platforms that preserve creativity, responsibility and surprise.
Read the full article at: www.nature.com
What is emergence, after all?
Abbas K Rizi
PNAS Nexus, Volume 5, Issue 2, February 2026, pgag010,
The term emergence is increasingly used across scientific disciplines to describe phenomena that arise from interactions among a system’s components but cannot be readily inferred by examining those components in isolation. While often invoked to explain higher-level behaviorsβsuch as flocking, synchronization, or collective intelligenceβthe term is frequently used without precision, sometimes giving rise to ambiguity or even mystique. In this perspective paper, I clarify the scientific meaning of emergence as a measurable and physically grounded phenomenon. Through concrete examplesβsuch as temperature, magnetism, and herd immunity in social networksβI review how collective behavior can arise from local interactions that are constrained by global boundaries. By refining the concept of emergence, it is possible to gain a clearer and more grounded understanding of complex systems. My goal is to show that emergence, when properly framed, offers not mysticism, but rather insight.
Read the full article at: academic.oup.com
The Economy as an Evolving Complex System IV
The contemporary global economy exhibits unprecedented structural complexityβcharacterized by nonlinear dynamics, adaptive behaviors, and emergent properties. Understanding these phenomena requires theoretical frameworks capable of addressing complexity, path dependence, and evolutionary processes.
Complexity economics has developed to address such intellectual challenges. Originating in a seminal 1987 Santa Fe Institute workshop and first described in The Economy as an Evolving Complex System (1988), this approach fundamentally reconceptualizes economic systems as complex adaptive systems. Subsequent volumes (1997, 2005) progressively developed this framework, offering new insights into finance, technological innovation, and social interactions.
Like each of its predecessors, this fourth volume is the product of an interdisciplinary workshop hosted at the Santa Fe Institute. It represents the latest synthesis, reflecting theoretical advances and methodological developments achieved over nearly four decades. Drawing on contributions from leading scholars worldwide, the chapters span foundational questions to policy applicationsβfrom agent-based modeling and network theory to macroeconomic dynamics, innovation systems, sustainability transitions, and inequality.
The result demonstrates complexity economics’ capacity to generate novel insights into phenomena that remain puzzling within traditional frameworks: financial instability, technological disruption, climate economics, and institutional change. This volume positions complexity economics as an essential analytical framework for understanding twenty-first-century economic realities.
More at: www.sfipress.org
Complexity Digest 
