0:01

We need a change in the

0:03

way we dwell in the world.

0:06

And that's, I think, urgent. From

0:21

the Santa Fe Institute, this is Complexity.

0:25

I'm Chris Capus. And I'm

0:27

Abba Elifobu. You

0:30

know, over the past two episodes, we've looked

0:32

at a lot of underlying laws that apply

0:34

to life. And they're deeply interesting.

0:37

But it's still striking to me that there's

0:39

so much diversity in the plants and

0:42

animals we see around us. And

0:44

one of the reasons, I think, that there's

0:46

been this lag in physicists getting involved in

0:48

the life sciences is that the biosphere is

0:51

really, really complicated. And that's not

0:53

to say that physics can't get complicated, too. We

0:55

try to do things like simulate the surface of the sun.

0:58

But when you look at something like the

1:00

scaling laws, there are many organisms that deviate

1:02

from what the laws would predict. Sure,

1:04

like if I think of a rabbit and a turtle.

1:07

Both animals are about the same

1:09

physical size, but their lifespans are

1:11

so different. A rabbit will

1:13

probably live less than 10 years, but a

1:16

turtle can live a decade. So then what's

1:18

going on there? What part of the

1:20

picture are we missing? Well, in

1:22

today's episode, this is exactly what we'll

1:24

dive into. We'll get

1:26

into what causes biodiversity and what

1:29

happens when biodiversity disappears. And

1:31

we'll hear from two researchers who will

1:33

show us why being able to make

1:35

predictions about the biosphere is really, really

1:37

urgent for us as humans. Part

1:44

one, why is a biosphere so

1:46

diverse? So

1:50

scaling laws, which we talked about

1:52

in our first episode, are basically this.

1:55

There's an underlying relationship between an organism's

1:57

physical size and a bunch of other

2:00

of traits, like how quickly it

2:02

burns through energy, its lifespan, and how much

2:04

it sleeps. You can even plot

2:06

it out on a graph, and it follows this

2:08

logarithmic curve. And if you were to

2:10

imagine all the plants and animals plotted out as

2:12

little dots on this graph, there's

2:15

an obvious slope and an underlying relationship.

2:18

But the dots don't adhere to a perfect line. It's

2:21

more like a tight cloud that's in the shape

2:23

of a line. Right. It's

2:25

like spraying an aerosol can of paint

2:27

to make a line, versus drawing it

2:29

with a really, really fine pen. Exactly.

2:32

The droplets kind of fly in different

2:34

directions, but the overall shape is still

2:36

there. So the scaling laws

2:38

are literally the laws of physics that every

2:41

organism feels equally. Scaling laws

2:43

are based on things like gravity and surface

2:45

area and fluid viscosity. So

2:47

let's pretend for a second that life

2:50

evolved in a kind of purgatory, just

2:52

a big blank white space of nothingness,

2:54

with just the laws of physics. Which

2:56

wouldn't actually be possible. Right.

2:59

Obviously that couldn't actually happen. But

3:01

if it did, everything would adhere perfectly to

3:03

the scaling laws. That graph

3:05

would be a thin, solid line, not

3:07

a cloud. Because organisms would

3:09

just be evolving to optimize the laws of

3:12

physics, to use energy in the most efficient

3:14

ways relative to the size of their bodies.

3:16

Okay. But we don't live in

3:19

a wide, vast expanse of nothingness. No,

3:21

we don't. We have a planet with

3:24

weather patterns, wildfires, different biomes, and different

3:26

altitudes. And so the environment we live

3:28

in then adds this additional layer of

3:31

influence to our bodies. That

3:33

might make the organism deviate a bit from

3:35

this perfect optimization to the laws of physics.

3:38

Because deviating is what allows it realistically

3:40

to survive in the ecosystem it's in.

3:43

And each organism is playing a kind of game

3:45

with its environment. Trying to figure out

3:47

how to adapt best to its surroundings while still

3:49

on a grand scale being bound by the laws

3:52

of physics and the shape of this cloud. So

3:54

that's why you could have two animals that are

3:56

roughly the same size, like the rabbit and the

3:59

turtle and the man. earlier, which have

4:01

different lifespans and move in different ways,

4:03

right? A turtle can live much longer

4:05

than a rabbit and it moves more

4:07

slowly. So it involves unique strategies to

4:10

survive in nature. Exactly.

4:12

And even though all organisms feel the laws

4:15

of physics equally, they don't feel

4:17

all the influences of the environment equally. Some

4:20

plants, like aspen, exist in places

4:22

with wildfires and have adapted to

4:24

thrive with periodic burns. Other

4:27

trees would be devastated by wildfires. Some

4:30

animals live in really cold climates,

4:32

others in tropical rainforests, etc. And

4:35

this brings me to some work that my colleague, Brian

4:37

Enquist, has done. So

4:40

my name is Brian Enquist. I'm a

4:43

professor in the Department of Ecology and

4:45

Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona

4:47

here in Tucson, Arizona. Brian

4:49

is one of the few people we've

4:51

spoken to who actually started out in

4:53

the life sciences fest and then became

4:56

interested in physics instead of the other

4:58

way around. I really do feel as

5:00

if I am a biologist, a classically trained

5:02

biologist that has found physics and I found

5:04

it rather early on. Somewhere around

5:06

the age of 10, I discovered that

5:09

I really like being outside. And I

5:11

remember climbing a tree for the first time just

5:13

on my own. I kind of wandered away from

5:16

the house and was out in the forest and

5:18

I was just very comfortable and I was very

5:20

proud of myself that I kind

5:22

of decided to do that on my own. I remember

5:24

sitting in the tree thinking, you know, this is pretty

5:26

cool. I think I want to do this for the

5:28

rest of my life. Brian's done

5:31

some really interesting work on biodiversity. So

5:33

this cloud of biodiversity might look pretty

5:35

random, but what he and several co-authors

5:38

have done is zoom in on that

5:40

cloud and ask, are there underlying laws

5:42

here that we can tease out? If

5:44

the basic laws of physics shape natural

5:46

selection in predictable ways, then certainly elements

5:48

of the environment will shape natural selection

5:50

in some predictable ways too. And

5:53

he and some co-authors have coined what's called

5:55

the trait driver theory. What

5:57

trait then of a plant or an animal

5:59

best predicts whether or not you occur

6:01

in an arctic environment or a tropical environment.

6:03

And it turns out that there are several

6:06

traits then that are very predictive in a

6:08

way. That is, if we see these traits,

6:10

we know something very concrete about

6:12

that organism in terms of how it

6:14

lives, how long it lives, its physiology,

6:17

its metabolism, and where it tends to

6:19

live on the planet. So trade driver

6:21

theory takes a characteristic, like how dense

6:23

a tree's wood is or how tall

6:25

it is. And it makes a prediction

6:27

about what type of environment that tree

6:30

has adapted to. Right. Like trees

6:32

tend to get shorter the closer you get

6:34

to the arctic. Or if

6:36

you think about wood density, for example,

6:38

balsa trees and mahogany trees are both

6:40

tropical plants that have found two different

6:43

ways to thrive in their warm environments.

6:45

And so if you've ever played around

6:48

with wood at all, if your kid

6:50

maybe made these balsa airplanes made out

6:52

of balsa wood, right, which is very

6:54

light wood, or if you tried to

6:56

move a desk made out of mahogany,

6:58

right, or some sort of like really

7:00

heavy tropical wood, you notice that there's

7:02

tremendous variation in wood density. So when

7:04

it comes to a mahogany tree, if

7:07

you invest in very, you know,

7:09

high density tissue, that

7:12

is an investment then for the future.

7:14

That indicates that you're going to be

7:16

there for a long time. So instead

7:18

of kind of taking that carbon, that

7:20

hard-earned carbon from photosynthesis and all that

7:22

metabolism then that's spent to obtain all

7:24

this carbon, you then allocate it into

7:27

something kind of, you know, seemingly non-useful

7:29

wood, or your tissue itself. And so

7:31

that investment is made so that you

7:33

kind of hang around longer, so that

7:35

you can then obtain then your resources

7:37

over a much longer time frame. And

7:40

something like balsa wood has very little

7:42

investment in your structure that you're building

7:44

in order to live. And so that

7:46

structure then is not, you know, kind

7:48

of built to last a long time.

7:50

But instead what we find is that

7:52

balsa wood lives a very fast life,

7:54

but a very short life. Has a

7:57

very high metabolic rate, has a high

7:59

photosynthetic rate. And it basically takes all

8:01

that carbon and puts it

8:03

right into seeds and babies. You know,

8:05

balsa trees can blow really easily in

8:07

the wind, can easily get knocked down

8:09

by animals. But if it can grow

8:11

up really quickly because of this very

8:13

cheap infrastructure, then it can throw all

8:15

of that carbon instead into reproduction and

8:18

then basically die. So,

8:20

balsa trees have adapted by being able

8:22

to reproduce quickly and easily, while mahogany

8:25

trees have adapted by investing more in

8:27

their own bodies and growing slower. And

8:29

it turns out, having denser wood makes

8:31

a tree hardier in the face of

8:34

a changing climate. And Brian and

8:36

his co-authors have actually begun to identify specific

8:38

plant traits that are better for adapting to

8:40

climate change. And this means

8:42

they can also identify which plants

8:45

don't have those traits. Brian published

8:47

a paper about this recently. Can

8:50

we develop a more predictive

8:52

theory for linking in these

8:54

traits to then how an

8:56

organism or a phenotype responds to a

8:58

change in climate? He had

9:00

a recent paper that he were part

9:03

of, published in Nature Communications, said

9:05

more than 17,000 tree species are

9:07

at risk from rapid global change.

9:10

Could you tell us a little bit about this

9:12

paper? Yeah. So, what we

9:14

actually found was that when we

9:16

looked at several different climate change

9:18

scenarios and different human land use

9:20

scenarios, we kept coming

9:22

up with similar

9:25

numbers in terms of the number of

9:27

species that seem to be increasingly

9:30

more threatened of having their total

9:32

area collapsing and their habitable area

9:34

then not available in future climate

9:36

change and human land use scenarios.

9:38

And so, we wanted to bookend

9:40

a number of what we were

9:42

talking about in terms of the

9:44

total number of species. And so,

9:46

our calculations based on these future

9:48

projections indicate that, yeah, about 17,000

9:50

species are at risk. This

9:54

is a pretty daunting number. And

9:56

of course, then that also opens the

9:58

door to additional research. and

10:01

as well as identify those species

10:03

and locations where immediate conservation action

10:05

would be needed. 17,000

10:11

species are at risk. Some people might

10:13

find that number unsettling, others might

10:15

think it's downright frightening. But

10:18

why? Why is it bad

10:20

if only the hardiest of organisms are

10:22

left? Survival of the fittest, right? Well,

10:25

in part two we'll get into

10:27

why biodiversity is important and

10:29

why finding fundamental underlying laws of the

10:31

biosphere is not just interesting for us

10:33

as scientists, but it's also crucial for

10:36

human existence in the face of a

10:38

changing planet. Why

10:45

is biodiversity important? So

10:51

let's say climate change has wiped out a

10:53

bunch of trees, but the mahogany tree is

10:55

still left. You could look at

10:57

a mahogany tree and say this tree is healthy

10:59

and strong, but if there aren't

11:01

many other types of trees around then the

11:03

ecosystem as a whole is weak. Biodiversity

11:07

is important. And it's

11:10

going to be a very important

11:12

thing for us to be able to actually

11:14

explore and be more efficient

11:16

at harvesting resources and generating

11:19

biomass. But at the same

11:21

time you are more protected

11:23

from pests and pathogens, you

11:25

might generate a fast kind

11:28

of decomposition rate and you

11:30

generate soil formation in an

11:32

amplified way so everything is

11:35

better. This is Pablo

11:37

Marquette. I'm Pablo Marquette.

11:39

I'm a professor at the Catholic

11:41

University in Chile. By training

11:43

I'm an ecologist. I'm, well,

11:45

right now I'm at the plant, you

11:48

know, spending holidays here in

11:50

Mexico. And when

11:52

I'm not traveling, I'm in Santiago

11:54

in Chile. Pablo

11:57

has done some research on metastatic cancer.

12:00

which at first glance seems a little far

12:02

removed from work on biodiversity and ecology. But

12:05

when we analyzed the network of

12:08

the primary organ and the metastatic

12:10

organ where it sends propagals, we

12:12

realized that it was an ecological

12:14

network. I mean, it has all

12:16

the properties that most ecological network

12:18

has. Metastatic tumors start out

12:20

in one organ in the body, and

12:23

then they look around for other organs to spread

12:25

to, fertile grounds for reproduction.

12:28

You can think of tumors as extremely

12:30

successful organisms in their ecosystem, maybe

12:33

a little too successful. What Pablo

12:35

and his team of co-authors discovered is

12:37

that the element phosphorus is like food

12:39

or fertilizer for tumors. So they spread

12:41

throughout the body to find more of

12:43

it. Because you need phosphorus

12:46

to build proteins, because you need

12:48

to build RNA that has a

12:50

lot of phosphorus in it and

12:52

ribosomes. So growing means that you

12:55

really have a very

12:57

active way of creating RNA

12:59

and creating proteins so you

13:02

can start growing a tumor.

13:05

So there was very limited data

13:08

on the phosphorus content of the

13:10

different organs of humans. But we

13:12

found out that usually the metastasis

13:15

goes to an organ that

13:17

actually have a higher phosphorus

13:19

content than the organ

13:22

where the primary tumor actually

13:24

started. And the reason for

13:26

that seems to be that

13:28

since they have altered the

13:30

metabolism and they are

13:33

very active in terms of

13:35

ATP, even generating energy, they

13:37

have the scope to actually

13:39

outgrow the cells. But

13:42

to do that they need more

13:44

phosphorus. So they will proliferate better

13:46

in a place where the phosphorus

13:48

content is higher. And we

13:50

found in statistical evidence that shows

13:52

that in fact that's the case.

13:54

And that is interesting to see

13:56

that a tumor cell wants to

13:58

actually capitalize on the the energy,

14:00

change the metabolism, start growing faster,

14:03

outgrow other cells, recruit some normal

14:05

cells in the body to actually

14:07

help them. So that was basically

14:09

the idea. Cancer

14:11

cells consume a lot of energy and

14:14

they outgrow the spaces they're in. Metastatic

14:16

cancer throws the body's ecosystem out

14:18

of whack. And what happens

14:20

when an ecosystem is out of balance

14:23

is that eventually that ecosystem breaks down.

14:26

If we take a step back and move

14:28

outside the ecosystem of the body to the

14:30

broader ecosystem of our planet, well,

14:33

we humans are like these

14:35

tumors, always looking around for more

14:38

phosphorus to consume. To

14:40

find an organism that might act

14:42

as a tumor, it would be

14:45

an organism that somehow the same

14:47

as a cell within a body

14:49

kind of break its social contract

14:52

with the rest of the cells.

14:55

And that would be an entity that somehow

14:57

broke its social connection

14:59

to the rest of

15:01

the entities. And the obvious

15:04

kind of entities ask. I

15:07

mean, we have been outgrowing

15:09

beyond what a normal species

15:11

of 75 kilos

15:14

will achieve in terms of density

15:16

and in terms of impact. I

15:21

mean, this is awful. We

15:23

humans, even if we want to be

15:25

good individuals and live good lives as

15:27

a whole, we're like cancer. At

15:30

least that's my initial reaction to this. But

15:33

Pablo doesn't describe it in moral

15:35

terms as good or bad. But

15:37

we're not bad. Metastatic

15:40

cells are not bad either. They're doing

15:42

something that is, it

15:45

might not be right for their

15:48

own persistence. So that's why we

15:50

have to learn that there is danger in terms

15:52

of what we are doing in the world

15:54

right now. There is danger for ourselves. That's

15:57

a problem. It might not

15:59

be easy. to

16:01

navigate through a degraded

16:04

biosphere. We

16:08

might want to learn the lesson before it's inevitable.

16:12

So that's why I think we have to change. We

16:15

need to change in the way we

16:17

dwell in the world. And

16:19

that's, I think, urgent. Aside

16:22

from whether or not this is good or bad, it's just basic

16:24

survival. We

16:27

need to think of ourselves as exceptional. We're

16:30

completely embedded in the biodiversity around us.

16:33

And we're a part of it. And we need it. I

16:36

mean, when life originated and started

16:38

changing and generating biodiversity, actually

16:41

it's like a wave of

16:43

biomass covering the Earth. And

16:46

that is one single thing that

16:48

have many different appearances. It's

16:52

just life. We are all part of

16:55

that tide of biomass

16:57

that is transforming and

16:59

have many different appearances. But

17:01

at the end of the day, it's something

17:03

that originated 3.8 billions

17:06

years ago to say a

17:08

date, but long past and

17:10

still here. And we are part of that.

17:13

We are that moment. It

17:15

is us. We are just a transformation,

17:18

so to speak. That

17:20

wave of biomass is like

17:22

a giant moving quilt with

17:25

all different colors, textures

17:27

and shapes. Let's

17:29

go back to Brian. Yeah,

17:32

so climate change is going

17:34

to be dramatically rearranging

17:36

how that quilt is put

17:39

together and built. The

17:41

quilt that we see of biodiversity

17:43

is the result of millions,

17:46

hundreds of millions of years of

17:48

evolution. In

17:50

the history of our planet, there have

17:52

been events that caused mass extinctions. Famously,

17:56

many scientists believe that most

17:58

dinosaurs became extinct. because

18:00

of an asteroid that hit the

18:02

Earth 66 million years ago. It

18:08

knocked out around 80% of

18:10

all species of animals that were on

18:12

the planet at that time. And obviously,

18:14

if you look around today, you can

18:17

tell that biodiversity eventually recovered and bounced

18:19

back. But climate

18:21

change will also rip out important

18:25

components of that quilt on

18:27

shorter evolutionary timescales. I

18:30

think the one thing that isn't

18:32

emphasized enough about the nature of

18:34

climate change is that time scales

18:37

associated with climate change relative to

18:39

the time scales at which biodiversity

18:41

and ecological processes kind of emerge.

18:43

So we're talking about an

18:46

enormous change in the Earth's

18:48

climate and reorganization of the

18:50

Earth's biomes that basically

18:52

occur close to human time

18:54

scales. And

18:56

examples of the past of mass

18:59

extinction events shown how this amazing

19:02

grandeur of biodiversity is able to

19:04

reorganize itself and basically come

19:06

back. And so life is tremendously resilient.

19:09

But the changes that we're seeing now

19:11

and increasingly are going to be seeing

19:14

are going to be operating at time

19:16

scales that are going to not only

19:18

rearrange this quilt of life, but

19:21

unfortunately rip out major components

19:23

of that quilt. And

19:25

as an ecologist, the concern

19:28

is that how much of

19:30

that tearing, that tattering, that

19:32

reorganization of life's rich tapestry

19:35

can our important ecosystem services

19:37

of clean air, clean water,

19:40

we rely on biodiversity for human

19:42

health, how much can it take? Brian,

19:45

Pablo, myself, and other scientists

19:48

are hoping that if we can tease out more

19:50

of these fundamental laws of life, we'll get a

19:53

better understanding of what's going to happen to our

19:55

biosphere. And so

19:57

when I step back and I think of all my

19:59

wonderful colleagues, in the Earth sciences,

20:01

and in particular those studying atmospheric sciences,

20:03

that I'm very envious of their ability

20:05

to predict the future of our climate

20:08

system. But it's clear that one of

20:10

the big uncertainties in understanding the future

20:12

of the climate system has to do

20:14

with what's going to happen to the

20:16

biosphere. And if we focus

20:18

that on the science of the

20:20

biosphere, we don't have the same

20:23

degree of predictive ability in terms

20:25

of predicting how the biosphere is

20:27

going to look and behave and

20:29

function under different climate change scenarios,

20:31

under different human land use scenarios,

20:33

under different extinction scenarios. What's

20:35

going to happen to the biosphere? Brian

20:37

and his co-authors have started to make predictions in

20:39

a kind of brute force way. And

20:42

these predictions are based on what we already know about

20:44

the 400,000 species ecologists have

20:47

catalogued so far. We already

20:49

know that an Arctic fox obviously prefers

20:51

a cold environment, for instance. But

20:53

that's not the same as making predictions based on

20:56

a unified period. And dealing with

20:58

this massive collection of data is hard. I

21:01

have to say that this work is

21:03

frustrating because dealing with biodiversity data is

21:05

very difficult. There's a lot of vagaries

21:07

and dirtiness of the data. The data

21:10

are not very nicely organized, very patchy.

21:12

There's a lot of issues. And so

21:14

we've been spending a lot of time

21:16

dealing with the dirtiness of biodiversity data.

21:18

But it's also a little unsettling because

21:21

we have very little theory for how

21:23

we basically kind of forecasting into the

21:25

future how these different species will respond.

21:28

But I have to say it's very challenging. So

21:32

why is it like this? I

21:35

mean, the Earth sciences have prioritized making

21:37

weather forecasts for a while. So why

21:39

is it that we're only just starting

21:41

to think about making forecasts in the

21:43

biosphere? Well Pablo has some

21:45

context for this and the history of ecology.

21:49

If you look at the history

21:51

of ecology, we ecologists come from

21:53

a tradition that started with the

21:55

big naturalist that were traveling the

21:57

world and describing the world and

21:59

being completely really dazzled by

22:01

the huge variety and diversity of

22:03

different forms and interaction among them.

22:06

And also because those things kind

22:08

of match our scale in time

22:10

of space, time, so that really

22:13

kind of lingers there. So

22:16

much of biology is rooted in naming

22:18

and cataloging. Historically, many naturalists

22:20

were exploring whatever was right in front

22:22

of them. And because naturalists

22:24

only had a small slice of the world

22:26

to look at, they were literally limited in

22:29

how well they could see the forest for

22:31

the trees. In contrast,

22:33

physics and mathematics have always been about

22:36

pulling back and finding abstract rules to

22:38

explain our world, but only for the

22:40

stuff that's non-living. And we're

22:42

now just starting to combine these two approaches.

22:45

And so increasingly, we've been looking

22:47

to some of these biological scaling

22:49

laws focused on trait environment interactions,

22:51

trying to figure out if there

22:53

are some underlying more kind of

22:55

like approaches to scaling up and

22:57

forecasting how biodiversity will respond. But

22:59

I have to say, it's very

23:01

challenging. Brian and

23:04

I are actually working on a paper

23:06

to identify and name these different approaches

23:08

to scientific inquiry, because being

23:10

able to think more critically about how

23:12

to use each of these approaches together

23:14

gets at existential issues. For

23:16

example, how to move science forward as

23:18

quickly as possible, which as Pablo

23:20

and Brian have both noted is urgent.

23:24

Yeah, so I should actually kind of step

23:26

back and say that this is a paper

23:28

we're trying to publish. It's not

23:30

published yet. And

23:32

we actually hope to hear back

23:34

on the second round of reviews

23:37

here sometime soon. But so scientific

23:39

trans-culturalism, this is a new idea

23:41

that we developed at the Santa

23:43

Fe Institute. And just

23:45

to step back a little bit,

23:47

the idea of scientific trans-culturalism kind

23:49

of starts with this

23:51

notion that there are multiple

23:53

ways to gain scientific insight then

23:56

about the world. And so

23:58

Those different ways of... Inning scientific inside

24:01

of could have different at the

24:03

philosophical and kind of cultural roots

24:05

and so one way that's pretty

24:07

prominent in biology is more a

24:09

kind of the natural history perspective.

24:12

And so natural history has given

24:14

us. You know, a wonderful catalogue

24:16

of life, that description of biodiversity

24:18

and of course be incredible explosion

24:20

of cellular biology and all the

24:23

details of basically how cells work

24:25

to how information is passed along

24:27

heritability, genetics than and so on.

24:33

This. Naturalist approach is an example of

24:35

what we're calling exactitude culture which looks

24:37

at the variability of the world and

24:40

finer in finer detail. Getting. Really,

24:42

really precise about what's been observed and

24:44

mapping out every single thing. And then

24:47

in the other direction we of course

24:49

grading. Which. Is pulling back and

24:51

trying to simplify everything? If

24:53

you haven't guessed by now, the Physics

24:55

of Life is all about applying that

24:58

course grainy, simplify everything approach to the

25:00

life sciences. Much. Of what

25:02

we've talked about in the first two

25:05

episodes are examples of this: scaling laws,

25:07

assembly theory, the way organisms reproduce and

25:09

now treat driver theory too. But.

25:11

Course during Culture Get you know is

25:14

in many different areas of science of

25:16

course and within the life sciences near.

25:18

Maybe this would be something like population

25:20

genetics or quantitative genetics. And so the

25:22

idea of course current culture is the

25:24

importance of abstraction and the importance of

25:27

things like parsimony and simplification so that

25:29

you can tell a gain traction in

25:31

understanding. And. It's important to note that

25:33

none of these approaches is better than any

25:35

other. We need all of them working together

25:38

in order to move science forward. So.

25:41

the idea of scientific trends culturalism

25:43

gets to this kind of notion

25:45

of what then determines the pace

25:47

of science how quickly science proceeds

25:49

and of course there is this

25:52

urgency of increasing the speed of

25:54

scientific progress in terms of understanding

25:56

how natalie climate change but the

25:58

bio diversity crisis how all of

26:00

these urgent challenges are

26:03

going to then lead to not

26:05

only cascade through the Earth system,

26:07

but then are going to be

26:10

presenting these new problems and challenges

26:12

for humanity that we urgently need

26:14

to identify before they're set upon

26:17

us. And so the

26:19

notion of scientific transculturalism is that

26:22

it can speed scientific

26:24

progress so that we can address

26:26

many of the different challenges associated

26:28

with the biosphere and the Anthropocene.

26:30

And so to do so, one

26:33

of the answers is to improve the

26:35

predictability of our models and so on.

26:41

Each step of this process, discovering

26:43

the scaling laws and then

26:45

understanding the traits that allow

26:47

plants and animals to adapt

26:49

to different environments, it feels

26:51

like unlocking pieces of a

26:53

huge grand puzzle. It's

26:55

actually quite hopeful because the more

26:58

we can predict and understand about

27:00

the biosphere, the more we can

27:02

at least attempt to prepare ourselves

27:04

for what's coming. That's

27:07

the goal with integrating different cultures of

27:09

science. It's really about expanding the way

27:11

we think about how science can be

27:13

done so we can improve and progress

27:15

and solve really important problems in a

27:17

better way. It's a very

27:19

SFI kind of attitude. And

27:22

so far in this season, we've seen

27:24

how this outlook can help us understand

27:26

the connections between all forms of life,

27:28

from the smallest cells to entire ecosystems.

27:31

But there's one more kind of big area

27:34

we haven't really talked about yet. And

27:36

what's that? It's society. I

27:38

mean, we are social animals. And

27:41

this planet has many, many other social animals

27:43

too. That's

27:50

right. In our next episode,

27:53

we'll take the scaling laws course graining

27:55

physics approach and ask, what are the

27:57

laws underlying communities? But humans

27:59

are So much more complex and

28:01

so much more complicated. They have so

28:04

many conflicting motivations that's next time on

28:06

complexity and before we go we have

28:08

a favor to ask if you've been

28:10

enjoying the show. The best thing you

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can do to support us is to

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tell a friend about it. for tell

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and review as an Apple. Podcasts modify

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or wherever you listen. it'll help new

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listeners find the show and thank you.

28:28

Complexity is the official podcast of the

28:30

Santa Fe Institute. This episode is produced

28:33

by Katherine One Cure and are theme

28:35

song is by Mitch Mcconnell. no additional

28:37

music from Blue.sessions and the rest of

28:39

our sound credits are in the show

28:42

notes for this episode, I'm Chris Thanks

28:44

for listening.