On a Saturday evening in November 1984, as the second of the Institute’s two exploratory founding workshops wound to a close, our founders – George Cowan, Murray Gell-Mann, David Pines, and their colleagues – knew at last they had in their net a new and rather charming species of scientific inquiry.
Richard Lenski has a front-row seat in the arena of evolution. Back in 1988, he put 12 genetically identical strains of the bacteria E. coli in 12 flasks. He and his students then kept the bacteria on a glucose diet while the separate populations reproduced at a rate of more than six generations per day. Every 500 generations, they captured samples from each population and froze them for later comparison and experimentation.
One insider has called economics a profession that has “lost its license of expertise.” Not only did most mainstream economists fail to see the financial crisis coming, they might have helped fuel it, unwittingly, through strategies fashioned from a rigid adherence to neoclassical economic theories and models.
