John Padgett application for SFI

I will describe my research interests in the following sequence: (a) the substantive phenomenon I wish to explain is the emergence of banking in Renaissance Florence; (b) the evolutionary process exemplified in this case is speciation—in particular, speciation viewed “metabolically” as the altered concatenation of multiple production networks; (c) modeling the dynamics of multiple networks, to predict alternate trajectories of “structural attainability” in both social and chemical systems, is a next research step; (d) I propose concrete activities, in pursuit of this agenda, at the end of this application.