By Thomas Grund, Christian Waloszek, and Dirk Helbing The body of economic literature will have to change, suggests new research.  In their computer simulations of human evolution, scientists at ETH Zurich find the emergence of the “homo socialis” with “other-regarding” preferences.  The results explain some intriguing findings in experimental economics and they call for a new […]

By Greg Fisher Last week I attended an excellent conference in Singapore, which had the intriguing title of “A Crude Look at the Whole”.  The title was attributable to Murray Gell-Man who was one of the founding fathers of the Santa Fe Institute and also the winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics.  Gell-Man […]

By Greg Fisher Last week I referred to the differences between natural and social complex systems in a blog article about FuturICT.  I received an email from an esteemed colleague who questioned (paraphrasing) whether this distinction was useful and whether in so doing I was putting humans on a pedestal.  In this article I want […]

By David Hales Almost everything we do these days leaves some kind of data trace in some computer system somewhere. When such data is aggregated into huge databases it is called “Big Data”. It is claimed social science will be transformed by the application of computer processing and Big Data. The argument is that social […]

By Greg Fisher Last week the European Commission chose not to invest in FuturICT, which was a massively ambitious project to integrate ICT and complexity science.  The aim was, as their website puts it, “understand and manage complex, global, socially interactive systems” and in so doing to “create a paradigm shift”. Driven mainly by ETH […]