In his research, David Krakauer explores the evolution of intelligence and stupidity on earth. This includes studying the evolution of cellular, linguistic, social, and cultural mechanisms and artifacts supporting memory and information processing.

David Krakauer was the founding Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the Co-Director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation, and Professor of Mathematical Genetics all at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

He was also a Fellow at the Genomics Frontiers Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, a Sage Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of Santa Barbara, a long-term Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and visiting Professor of Evolution at Princeton University. His research centers around a series of fundamental questions:

1. How did intelligence evolve in the universe?
2. What is the relationship of intelligence to fundamental physical and biological laws, to include entropy production, the arrow of time, and natural selection?
3. How do collectives of adaptive agents generate novel ideas and come to predict and understand the worlds in which they live?
4. How do ideas evolve and how do they to encode natural and cultural life?
5. What is the relationship of organic to inorganic, cultural, and institutional mechanisms of computation and representation?

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