Marcus Hamilton: Santa Fe Institute

We can observe, examine and study the world around us meaningfully at many scales. Biologists may study genes, populations, species, ecosystems, or the biosphere. Social scientists may study the behavior of individuals, the dynamics of cities, or aspects of the archaeological past. But of course, at a coarse-grained level we are all examining the same system, just at different scales, and so the question then becomes; how do we integrate across all these scales to understand something about the fundamental mechanisms driving the complexity of living systems, including humans? In this talk I will introduce the scaling approach to understand the structure and function of biological systems, and how we can leverage insights gained in the biological realm to understand how human ecology has evolved. I will argue that economies of scale are fundamental to life, including human societies, and the scaling approach provides a powerful mathematical and statistical framework for understanding why.