Learning From the Octopus

by Rafe Sagarin

  For the troops on the ground, the process of adapting began soon after the invasion of Bagdad. They “went to war with the Army they had” (to paraphrase Rumsfeld), and it worked brilliantly for a while. With massive firepower, better training, and air superiority, even the most feared of Saddam Hussein’s forces virtually collapsed in front of the advancing coalition. But as the old regime collapsed, the ground became rich for any number of new threats to sprout up. The threat environment radically changed.

  Suddenly, thousands of soldiers, independently as individuals and linked through the units they fought with, were observing that hidden improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were becoming their biggest threat to security. Whereas the DoD had planned for a war against AK-47s, Scud missiles, and weapons of mass destruction, soldiers on the ground began to see their enemies as random trash piles, sudden fender benders in downtown traffic, and cell phones; hiding, distracting from, and detonating IEDs. By the time Wilson was so incensed as to dare breach military protocol to give a superior officer a dressing down, 266 of his colleagues had been killed due to IEDs.6

  The soldiers adapted the best that they could—welding metal plates to their vehicles, blocking up culverts to eliminate the most obvious niches for bombers to use, and learning to identify the signs of hidden bombs in otherwise unremarkable debris. But their ability to adapt was limited by forces beyond their control—by the equipment they were given, by the available scrap metal, by the rules of engagement that they were ethically and legally bound by—and the casualties mounted.

  By contrast, the Department of Defense had virtually unlimited resources, especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when no politically minded senator or representative would ever turn down a military appropriation request. What the DoD lacked was adaptability. Even as Specialist Wilson and his comrades were frantically tracking the rapidly changing tactics of insurgents, the DoD was slowly churning away on weapons systems and fighting procedures that had been dreamed up long ago in places far, far away from the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah. Rumsfeld’s retort to Wilson belied a centralized view whereby small numbers of intellectuals design a battle plan and the accompanying technology years in advance, and that’s what you go to war with. Moreover, even to bring the idealized technological solutions to deal with the threats theorized by DoD experts, the department was bound by a ponderous top-down procurement system in which a small number of large contractors submitted bids for development of weapons systems that inevitably ran over-budget and beyond the estimated timeline.

  As a result, until Specialist Wilson’s outburst, the upper reaches of the DoD were neither sensing changes in the threat environment nor responding quickly when new threats were correctly identified. And even after congressional outrage from the exchange between Wilson and Rumsfeld fueled calls to speed up production and deployment of mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs), they did not arrive in Iraq in until November 2007, nearly three years later. By that time, an additional 1,589 of Wilson’s colleagues had been killed due to IED attacks. The DoD solution certainly arrived too late to save their lives, but also too late to even deal with the original threat. A rapid downward trend in IED attacks and deaths was already well on its way by the time the MRAPs arrived in Iraq (see Figure 1, page xxii).

  Nonetheless, DoD was able to claim that the MRAPs were ready just in time for a renewed offensive in the long-simmering war in Afghanistan. But the environment of Afghanistan was very different, much more rugged, than that of Iraq. Most of it was downright impassable to 14–24-ton vehicles like the MRAPs, which meant that the Taliban’s cheap, beat up old Toyota pickup trucks (probably the most adaptable vehicle ever built) could operate at will without interference from the lumbering U.S. forces. The few roads in Afghanistan that were MRAP accessible quickly became targets for IED attacks (which had been only a minimal threat up until this point), so that simple travel to a meeting with local leaders became a cumbersome and dangerous affair, sometimes taking all day to move 12 kilometers or so.7

  The military recognizes now how poorly adapted the first MRAPs are. In fact, after two years of deployment, nearly half of the 16,000 MRAPs produced are being put on “inactive status” 8 (kind of like your neighbor’s old Camaro on blocks, only the MRAPs being put on blocks are only two years old and cost half a million dollars each). Even as soldiers were stuffing themselves into the brand-new MRAPs, contracts went out for the next generation of MRAPs—known as the MRAP-All-Terrain Vehicle (M-ATV) and weighing only 7–10 tons (a typical four-wheel-drive Toyota pickup weighs just over 1 ton).

  It wasn’t due to a lack of effort or resources that the NGOs responding to the tsunami and the Department of Defense failed so miserably to adapt relative to the lowly animals on the shore or the lowly grunt soldiers in their Humvees. In reaction to the disasters in Asia and in Iraq, trillions of dollars in aid and military budget have been spent trying to plan for, predict, and perfect our responses. But organisms in nature and soldiers on the ground don’t have the luxury of limitless resources and hours of meetings and PowerPoint presentations to map out their future. In short, natural adaptive systems don’t plan, they don’t predict, and they don’t perfect.

  Figure 1: Number of deaths per month of U.S. forces due to IEDs in Iraq (black) and Afghanistan (gray)

  There is no scientific evidence to support the notion that evolved biological systems are “intelligently designed” or planned in advance. There are numerous natural examples to illustrate this point, but one look at the Mola mola—a huge slow-swimming fish so bizarre you would swear that you were looking at a fish that had its back half bitten off by a shark and then was rolled over with an underwater steamroller—will convince you that it followed no plan in its development as a fish. Yet in its own way of surviving for millions of years, it has been as wildly successful as a tuna or a trout. An unlikely creature such as the Mola mola emerged because the process of evolution doesn’t tend toward any endpoint. It doesn’t try to make an eye or an immune system or a beautiful fish. Evolution proceeds by solving survival problems as they arise. Many systems in society, by contrast, are littered with meticulously planned designs—the Maginot Line comes to mind—that were entirely unable to solve emerging threats from the environment.

  These unplanned, evolved, adaptable organisms themselves don’t make predictions. Why not? Simply because the complex world of continually changing and interacting biological organisms acting within a dynamic and networked matrix of biogeochemical stocks and flows that they live in is not predictable. At best, organisms anticipate events that come in well-defined cycles—thus, many organisms have strong “circadian rhythms” that allow them to respond to light/dark cycles, and many coastal marine organisms move in anticipation of tidal rhythms. They may also use their keen sensory abilities and stored sensory observations to act in anticipation of unusual events, as evidenced by the animals responding to the December 2004 tsunami. This is not predicting an unknown future event but rather using sharply honed observational skills to respond to a challenge. Making and responding to predictions that are very unlikely to be correct is a waste of resources that are better spent finding food, avoiding predators, and mating. In the spring of 2011 alone, the devastating Japan tsunami with its commensurate effects on the country’s nuclear power infrastructure, the so-called Arab Spring, and the outbreak of antibiotic-resistant E. coli in Europe were all threats to security that were possible to anticipate (along with an almost infinite number of other security threats that did not come to pass during that year) but impossible to predict.

  Finally, a common misconception about evolution is that it is about seeking perfection, as encapsulated in the term survival of the fittest. This misinterpretation arises from misguided applications of Darwinian thought, such as eugenics, and it is reflected in more legitimate societal applications such as business performance analyses where “optimization” is seen as a laudable goal. In fact, evolution is neither about survival of
the “fittest” nor about optimizing systems. How would you even begin to determine what is a perfectly adapted organism? While the Discovery Channel may spin the notion during “Shark Week” that the Great White Shark is the “perfect predator,” wouldn’t it be “more perfect” if it had deadly laser beam eyes? Indeed, trying to make a predictive science of optimality in organisms has proved itself to be almost comically wrong in case after case. For example, the first time depth sensors were attached to a live penguin, the animal dove to depths greatly exceeding its optimal performance as determined by mathematical theory and laboratory physiological experiments.9 The successful results of evolution are organisms that are not perfect, but “good enough” to survive and reproduce themselves.

  Eliminating the ability to plan, to try to predict, or to try to perfect would put a lot of military planners and business consultants out of business (it might also greatly reduce the number of PowerPoint presentations to which people are subjected). But organisms in nature have survived and thrived without these tools for billions of years because they have one powerful trait at their disposal—they are all adaptable. Adaptability is fundamentally different from merely reacting to a crisis (which happens too late) or attempting to predict the next crisis (which is almost certain to fail when complex ecological systems and human behaviors are involved). Adaptability controls the sweet spot between reaction and prediction, providing an inherent ability to respond efficiently to a wide range of potential challenges, not just to those that are known or anticipated.

  This book is about learning how natural systems have used adaptability to survive in a risk-filled planet for billions of years and how we can harness this power ourselves right now. Using nature as a guide, we can observe how far our responses to security threats—whether they come from terrorists, viruses, economic catastrophes, or natural disasters—have missed the sweet spot of adaptability and how exactly we can get back there. Taken together, the suggestions in this book, developed from the perspectives of many different life scientists, soldiers, first responders, and activists, make up a system of “natural security” applicable to any situation where risk is present and unpredictable.

  chapter one

  THE ORIGINS OF NATURAL SECURITY

  MY TRANSITION FROM a tide-pool biologist practicing natural history to a security analyst practicing natural security is itself a story of adaptation. If you think about the first proto amphibians flopping out of a predator-filled sea to forge a new terrestrial life, it reminds us that adaptation requires leaving or being forced from your comfort zone and into a place where you observe and experience new threats to your security. In 2002, I left my comfort zone of marine biology research in the tide pools of the Pacific to work as a science advisor in Washington, D.C., for then Congresswoman Hilda Solis. There, less than a year after the 9/11 attacks, I had a window into the unfolding of a massive new security infrastructure. Although I was far from the tide pools where I had conducted my research, my inclinations as a natural historian led me to sketch the security environment of the nation’s capital. At that time, it was impossible to be in D.C. without observing the sense of fear and desire for security that pervaded the Capitol Hill ecosystem. What I observed (to borrow Mike Davis’s term for the environmental catastrophes of Los Angeles1) was an “ecology of fear.” Jersey barriers continually emerged overnight like fungus in rings around monuments, museums, and government buildings. Mail arrived, uselessly, months after it was sent, brittle from the radiation treatments it had undergone in some Midwestern processing facility. Seasoned Capitol Hill staffers and young interns jumped tensely at any loud noise (which often turned out to be construction from the enormous bunker-like visitors’ center that was being carved out under the Capitol building), and everyone kept portable chemical masks under their desks.

  But something deeper troubled me about what I was seeing. While there was clearly more security in Washington, it was never varied security. It was as if all the new security measures in D.C. were installed as part of an animatronic diorama in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Occasionally, new features were added—another fierce security guard here, another imposing concrete barrier there—and once in a while there was a change—security guards began systematically checking trunks of cars entering the Capitol parking lot after 9/11—but there was no variation in the elements of the diorama or their behaviors. The tide pools I studied in Monterey have inspired artists and authors and scientists not for their static perfection but for their continual movement and change, a variation that doesn’t just provide beauty but is the driving force compelling the ecosystem and the creatures within it to continually adapt to keep secure.

  As I walked through the routine Capitol security checkpoint each day, dutifully covering the keys in my pocket because everyone knew that’s how you avoid setting off the metal detector, I kept asking myself, “How long would it take for a determined predator to get through these defenses?” Thinking about the practice of security (of which I knew almost nothing) in the context of biology led me to other questions almost every day in Washington. As I watched the debate over authorizing the Iraq war unfold on the House floor I asked, “Do animals declare war on other animals?” When the Total Information Awareness program was unveiled, with its spooky logo depicting the one-eyed pyramid from the dollar bill beaming its vision on the whole planet, I struggled to answer, “Which organisms in nature have total awareness of the threats in their environment?” As various versions of the Patriot Act were passed I wondered, “How does our own immune system profile invading organisms to determine who is benign and who is malicious?” As our defense and security budget grew ever larger, threatening to topple any semblance of a balanced budget, I asked, “How does a peacock survive when new predators colonize its home area?” And with each thwarted or successful terrorist attack I wondered, “Why does it make sense from an evolutionary standpoint to kill yourself in a suicide attack?”

  As I asked these questions, trying to leap back and forth between biology and current events, I began to realize that not only did I know very little about security, I also knew very little about biology. In fact, what always appealed to me about a career in biology was the overwhelming diversity of things to study—I knew I’d never get bored—even as I knew any expertise I did gain would at best cover a tiny sliver of the whole picture. So I started asking my questions out loud, both to the security experts I met at Hill briefings and in committee rooms, and to my biologist friends around the world. Activating these two networks led to unexpected effects. Almost all of the security analysts and practitioners I talked to were thrilled about the idea of applying thinking and models from evolutionary science to security questions. They invariably confided in me that they were just running out of ideas much beyond dividing history into “pre- and post-9/11.” By contrast, many of the biologists I talked to were initially skeptical that they had anything to contribute to a debate on security. Being an overwhelmingly liberal group, a few even flat-out refused to do anything that might legitimize what they saw as the Bush administration’s exploitation of terrorism to justify its conservative agenda. But eventually, even some of the most skeptical came around, and almost everyone knew someone who probably had something to say on the matter, such that soon I had an informal group of ecologists, psychologists, anthropologists, paleobiologists, and virologists, not to mention security analysts, bio-warfare experts, and former (and, for all I know, present) spies, all energized to further explore the nexus between biological and societal survival.

  I convened this group over the course of a year at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), a National Science Foundation–supported think tank in Santa Barbara, California, that typically supported meetings of scientists and economists to discuss big environmental science questions such as, “Why do certain species live in some places and not others?” “What is the global impact of commercial fishing on the world’s oceans?” and “How much habitat must
be protected to preserve species?” Fortunately, NCEAS stepped out of its comfort zone to support our working group, which I sowed with only a basic challenge: “What can we learn about security in society from security in nature?” Because of the enthusiasm of the participants and their commitment to step out of their own comfort zones, this initial question blossomed into an incredibly stimulating and creative discussion that continues to seed new lines of inquiry. As the ideas generated in several gatherings at NCEAS coalesced into key lessons, my colleagues and I have now begun to spread their conclusions to a wide range of audiences, from scientific societies and security think tanks to innovative companies such as Google and IBM, to elected officials and high-level security policy planners and boots-on-the-ground soldiers and first responders. Many of these audience members have become active participants in generating further refinements and applications of our initial explorations.

  The ideas in this book thus come from many different sources of expertise and especially from the product of cross-breeding these lines of expertise. Yet the personalities of our working group members and the individuals we debated our ideas with were so strong and their ideas so compelling that it’s impossible to let them fade into the interdisciplinary synthesis that resulted from our work. Accordingly, I will highlight several of their individual contributions in the chapters to follow. It is also intriguing to me that few of their ideas could really be separated in a coolly scientific way from their personal histories. Geerat Vermeij understands adaptive arms races in nature both because of his painstakingly detailed approach to natural history and because of the special adaptations his own brain and body have undertaken as a result of his early blindness. Luis Villarreal understands the deep evolutionary roots of self-identity systems (the mechanism by which all organisms know who is like themselves and who is different from themselves) both because of his expertise as a virologist and from his perspective as a mentor to young Latino science students. And Terry Taylor understands the value of symbiosis, not just because it’s a good idea, but because his personal transformation from a soldier to a facilitator of peaceful solutions to conflict came through developing unexpected symbiotic partnerships.