C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems

Context is king: whether in language, ecology, culture, history, economics, or chemistry. One of the core teachings of complexity science is that nothing exists in isolation — especially when it comes to systems in which learning, memory, or emergent behaviors play a part. Even though this (paradoxically) limits the universality of scientific claims, it also lets us draw analogies between the context-dependency of one phenomenon and others: how protein folding shapes HIV evolution is meaningfully like the way that growing up in a specific neighborhood shapes educational and economic opportunity; the paths through a space of all possible four-letter words are constrained in ways very similar to how interactions between microbes impact gut health; how we make sense both depends on how we’ve learned and places bounds on what we’re capable of seeing.

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week on Complexity, we talk to Yale evolutionary biologist C. Brandon Ogbunu (Twitter, Google Scholar, GitHub) about the importance of environment to the activity and outcomes of complex systems — the value of surprise, the constraints of history, the virtue and challenge of great communication, and much more. Our conversation touches on everything from using word games to teach core concepts in evolutionary theory, to the ways that protein quality control co-determines the ability of pathogens to evade eradication, to the relationship between human artists, algorithms, and regulation in the 21st Century. Brandon works not just in multiple scientific domains but as the author of a number of high-profile blogs exploring the intersection of science and culture — and his boundaryless fluency shines through in a discussion that will not be contained, about some of the biggest questions and discoveries of our time.

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Discussed in this episode:

“I do my science biographically…I find a personal connection to the essence of the question.”

– C. Brandon Ogbunugafor on RadioLab

"Environment x everything interactions: From evolution to epidemics and beyond"
Brandon’s February 2022 SFI Seminar (YouTube Video + Live Twitter Coverage)

“A Reflection on 50 Years of John Maynard Smith’s ‘Protein Space’”
C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in GENETICS

“Collective Computing: Learning from Nature”
David Krakauer presenting at the Foresight Institute in 2021 (with reference to Rubik’s Cube research)

“Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power”
Alexander Matt Turner, Logan Smith, Rohin Shah, Andrew Critch, Prasad Tadepalli in arXiv

“A New Take on John Maynard Smith's Concept of Protein Space for Understanding Molecular Evolution”
C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Danie