Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute[edit]

In 2015, the Santa Fe Institute was awarded a three-year, $2.5 million grant

to support the development of a general theory of complexity, constituting
"a concise, parsimonious, and potentially mathematizable framework for
understanding complex adaptive systems".[36]
Biology and human development[edit]

A grant of over three million dollars to the Stone Age Institute supports the

study of what factors led human ancestors to things such as toolmaking.

A 2019 grant supports the study of the distribution of the Indo-European

languages.
In 2016, the foundation awarded $5.4 million to the Foundation for Applied
Molecular Evolution (FfAME) in order to study the origin of life on Earth,
particularly investigating questions of how early RNA interacted with water,
which is necessary for life but also degrades RNA, and how the
introduction of energy to organic materials yielded life rather than turning it
into tar.[5] The project is headed by molecular biophysicist and
chemist Steven A. Benner.[5] The foundation also awarded an $8 million
grant to a program examining a theory in evolutionary biology
called extended evolutionary synthesis.[5] This project is headed by
evolutionary biologist Kevin Laland.[37]
Several grants have specifically supported inquiry into various aspects of
human evolution. A 2014 grant of $4.9 million supports an effort at Arizona
State University by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson to explore how
we became human, and a $3.2 million grant to Indiana University and
the Stone Age Institute supports the study of "what factors led human
ancestors to develop skills like making tools, developing language, and
seeking out information".[5]
In March 2019, the foundation provided the bulk of a group of grants adding
up to over $7 million to enable the Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and
Behavioral Science (The Brain Institute) at Chapman University to examine
"how the human brain enables conscious control of decisions and actions".
[38]

A grant from the foundation supports a study of religion and health

conducted by Tyler VanderWeele of Harvard University. Vander is the John
L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the
Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan
School of Public Health, and co-director the University's Initiative on Health,
Religion and Spirituality. His research has focused on the application
of causal inference to epidemiology, as well as on the relationship
between religion and health.[39][40][41]
In June 2019, the foundation awarded one of its largest grants to the
Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School for its Ancient DNA Atlas
project that seeks to sequence the DNA of ancient human remains in order
to tell the story of human migration and development through the addition
of DNA sequences of 10,000 individuals spanning 50,000 years. [42] The
funding was used to solve a riddle that had puzzled historians, classicists,
linguists, anthropologists and archaeologists for 200 years - whether the
bulk of the European civilization had arrived from Anatolia or the Pontic
Steppes of Central Asia, and how Indo-European languages spread over
an enormous geographical area from Britain to India, becoming the
largest linguistic group today.[43]
The funding was used to embrace a multi-disciplinary approach and crowd-
source results before the final manuscripts were completed, receiving
commentary and feedback from academics of various institutions on
several continents, according to geneticist David Reich,[43] lead researcher
on the project. The study was also funded by the governments of
the US, Russia, Germany (Max Planck Institute), European
Union and India. Results have been published in Science and Cell.
Social sciences[edit]
Pew Research Center[edit]
Main article: Pew Research Center
The Pew Research Center, an American fact tank or research organization,
has been "jointly and generously funded" by The Pew Charitable
Trusts and the foundation for its studies focusing on demographics of
religions in the world, part of the series entitled Pew-Templeton Global
Religious Futures.[44][45][26]
Center on Religion and Chinese Society[edit]
The Center on Religion and Chinese Society of the Purdue
University in Indiana is funded by the foundation.[46] The current director of
the center, the Chinese American Christian scholar Fenggang Yang, has
been granted more that $9.5 million to support his projects, [47] The center
has published research on religion in China, especially based on Yang's
own theory of the so-called "religious market", with speculations were
based on a report of the Pew Research Center, another publication backed
by the foundation.[48] Some scholars of Chinese religion have criticized
Yang's sociological theories about religion in China, [49][50] although the New
York Times has referred to Yang as "a pioneer in the study of the sociology
of religion in China",[51] and the Wall Street Journal has deemed him a
"leading scholar on Chinese church-society relation". [52]