Santa Fe Institute Profile picture
Feb 15 • 11 tweets • 15 min read
"Environment x everything interactions: From evolution to epidemics and beyond"

Today's SFI Colloquium by @big_data_kane (@Yale), streaming now:


🔍 Follow this thread for highlights... Image
"Part of what we're going to exploit is the multiple definitions behind something [as fundamental as] 'environment' ... in SOME ways, you don't care much about the thing you're looking at; you care about its EFFECT."

- @big_data_kane (@Yale) speaking now:
ImageImageImageImage
"The environment is an actor and a character in all of our stories. But too often we treat it as something to be regressed away. I joke: 'Find me a piece of DNA that behaves without interaction with its environment.'"
- @big_data_kane (@Yale) speaking now:
ImageImage
"You should be a historian of your own field."
- @big_data_kane (@Yale) speaking now on John Maynard Smith and his (largely non-mathematical) rebuttal to creationist Frank Salisbury, which reinforced the incremental aspects of evolution:
ImageImageImageImage
Word games as an analogy for protein evolution:

"'Making sense' in this case means the protein is able to perform its function. Context & environments shape what is meaningful & accessible."

- @big_data_kane (@Yale) on networks & sensibility:
ImageImageImageImage
"Each individual letter flip hits a genetic background, and which letter flip defines if that's a functional mutation or not. [This is] epistasis: 'the *surprise* at the phenotype' when mutations are combined' [from DW Heinrich]."
- @big_data_kane (@Yale):
ImageImageImageImage
"What is the effect of a letter flip *on average* against the background of its environment [in this case, different drug concentrations]?"

- @big_data_kane (@Yale) on evolution, information, and #surprise at the level of protein evolution:


#Omicron ImageImage
"The most important person in my scientific autobiography was my football coach Al — the first person to teach me that you can catch a transmissible disease from your environment."

- @big_data_kane (@Yale) on then vs. now:
ImageImageImageImage
"You build a model in which the entire world is made of a different type of surface...we did this and [with the same pathogen] in each you get an *entirely different* pandemic."

- @big_data_kane (@Yale) speaking at SFI now:
ImageImageImage
"Part of the motivation for me thinking about the environment: I was raised by somebody much more intelligent than me who DIDN'T get the opportunity to wear tweed and talk to fancy people ... So I tell stories."

- @big_data_kane (@Yale) speaking at SFI:
ImageImageImageImage
"When you put a system that's already biased under stress? It gets worse. When you put courts under lockdown, more people push for plea deals. Some people were not able to work from home [during COVID] so you get an increase in police interactions..."

- @big_data_kane (@Yale) Image

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Santa Fe Institute

Santa Fe Institute Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @sfiscience

Feb 14
On the Shape of Epidemics

Live now: @svscarpino speaking at SFI

"If we just want to make forecasts, learning the mechanisms may not matter."
- @svscarpino (SFI, @RockefellerFdn)
"All the way back to Farr, he's telling us that the curves aren't symmetric. We keep using models that we KNOW are wrong."
- @svscarpino (SFI, @RockefellerFdn)
Read 8 tweets
Sep 16, 2021
🧵 Global catastrophic and existential risks: the weightiest complex phenomena?

"Our job is to think about how humanity can have a happy ending...about how GOOD it can be."

- @anderssandberg of @FHIOxford speaking at SFI today:


#AIEthics #Biosecurity
"The idea that humanity actually *could* go extinct required a lot of ideas to come together. First you needed to know that species go extinct. This wasn't clear until [the discovery of fossil Mastodons]."
- @anderssandberg of @FHIOxford at SFI today:

"It's not just that the end of the world could be caused by a bad political decision. In principle, the *right* political decision or technology could *avert* these risks. In the 19th C, it was a considered merely a matter of natural causes."
- @anderssandberg (@FHIOxford) at SFI
Read 14 tweets
Apr 16, 2021
"It remains to be seen if we'll rise to this challenge. I'm optimistic, but there's so much more we need to do. We're good at developing new technologies...are we as good at the society-scale change we need?"
- SFI/@MIT Prof Jessika Trancik on @voxdotcom:

player.fm/series/vox-con…
@MIT @voxdotcom "If you're purchasing a #CleanEnergy technology, you're creating a market that then drives more #innovation, so everybody can contribute. It DOES also mean that we can't find #SilverBullets. We can't find one really smart person to solve this. We need everyone to contribute."
@MIT @voxdotcom "The way we can get larger projects to improve more quickly is #standardization. We need to understand the parts that are holding projects back, where the inefficiencies come in. I use a broad definition of #technology because these #inefficiencies crop up in different ways."
Read 5 tweets
Apr 16, 2021
"#Economics in #Nouns and #Verbs"

Below, we share key excerpts from SFI External Prof W. Brian Arthur's (@Stanford, @PARCinc) latest, available at arxiv.org/abs/2104.01868, which we recommend for its elucidation of key blind spots in economic thinking & how to address them... Image
"Different means 'see' differently—often they reveal different versions of the same object. #MRI looks at body parts and reveals soft tissue structure; #CT scanning looks at the same body parts and reveals bone structure. There is no 'correct' version of internal body parts."
"#Mathematics is powerful in #economics—and necessary—but I don’t believe that it is suited to describing all that is interesting in an economy. In fact I don’t believe that there is any privileged way to view the economy. There are useful ways and less useful ones."
Read 14 tweets
Mar 31, 2021
"The Evolution of Agency"

Follow this thread for highlights from today's seminar by @WiringTheBrain of @trinitycollege. Watch without login on Facebook (we will post the recording to YouTube within 24 hours):

facebook.com/santafeinstitu…
"The genome doesn't specify the outcome at all; it just encodes the biochemical rules by which development happens."

- @WiringTheBrain on the multi-level interplay of "nature" and "nurture" on #personality ImageImageImageImage
"It's trendy today to deny that #FreeWill is real."

- @WiringTheBrain quotes @SamHarrisOrg & Schopenhauer on the prominence of biological #determinism and neural #reductionism in modern thinking on the nature of choice.

facebook.com/santafeinstitu… ImageImageImageImage
Read 9 tweets
Mar 9, 2021
On #InternationalWomensDay we'd like to pause and celebrate just a small slice of the enormous contributions to science women have made here at SFI.

Read the thread below for links to some of their own favorite research papers, and a few nominated by other SFI faculty members:
Read 21 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

:(