Learning From the Octopus

by Rafe Sagarin

  But the primary driver of this book is what we can observe from nature itself. Observing nature is an endless task—one that can be tremendously enjoyable but also frustrating and confusing; just ask any birder. As with a field guide used by birders or other naturalists, it helps to have a few key things to look out for—identifying characteristics that help make sense of the vast diversity of nature. There are indeed a few simple themes that emerge in a study of natural evolution that are helpful to have in the back of your mind when considering different ways of applying lessons from nature to society.

  FIELD CHARACTERS OF NATURAL SECURITY SYSTEMS

  First (let’s just get it out of the way), under the lens of natural history, humans are special, but not that special. There are a number of adaptations we have—such as advanced cognition and language—that both set us apart from most other species and create a lot of the complex security threats we face, but we are in the end just another species that evolved through time to deal with security challenges in our environment. With over a billion people facing chronic nutrition shortages2 and a host of old and emerging diseases that threaten to turn into human pandemics, we are certainly still under pressures of natural selection. Moreover, the way we have evolved has changed our environment enough to force us to adapt further. This cuts several ways for us—we are extremely adaptable, but we also may have changed our world and way of living faster than some parts of us can evolve. Some of our adaptations, which first arose in a world completely unlike the societies we live in today, can get us into trouble now.

  Second, just as humans are fundamentally similar to all other species, patterns in nature appear similar across different levels of biological organization. By levels of biological organization I mean the progression from molecules to DNA to cells to bodies of individual organisms to populations of those individuals to communities of those individuals interacting with individuals of other species to ecosystems that include the species, habitats, and chemical and energetic interactions between them all in a given area. What is remarkable is that similar patterns—for example, using noncentralized organization to sense and respond to the environment (discussed in Chapter 4)—appear at each level of this organization. Like Russian nesting dolls, biology has a nested quality. But biology is more than simply nested—each of the wooden dolls, after all, is just an independent entity, only connected to the others by having a similar shape and design. Biology is different because it is also a recursive process, meaning that the rules and patterns occurring at one level are not just similar to those at the next level but essential in defining what happens at the next level. In this sense, biology is like a spiral, and it shouldn’t be surprising that spirals appear all over in nature—in the seeds of a sunflower, in the shell of a snail, and along the helical axis of DNA. All of this is a good sign for applying biologically inspired ideas to security in society because it suggests that solutions we devise that work at one level (say, within a single police precinct) will be applicable at a completely different level (e.g., throughout the Department of Homeland Security). It also invalidates the excuse that we can’t change security policy unless our highest levels of government change. I will argue that we can start at any level of society in instituting more adaptable systems, and if we align our incentives correctly, these ideas can easily (in fact, will almost inevitably) spread up and down different levels of organization in society.

  Third, complex natural patterns and processes arise from very simple building blocks. The four basic molecules of DNA code for a vast diversity of organisms that live in completely different ways and deal effectively with vastly different challenges. Natural selection, which has molded millions and millions of species into their forms today, is an incredibly simple process requiring just three simple elements—variation between individuals, environmental conditions that favor (or select) certain variants over others, and a means to reproduce those variants that are better suited to the environment. At higher levels of biological organization the simple process of individual organisms trying to survive and reproduce ends up producing networked ecosystems that are unpredictable, complex, resilient, and beautiful. Accordingly, natural security isn’t about rising to the complexity of the security threats we face by designing a hugely complex system with flow charts and acronyms and multivariate statistical outputs. It’s about finding simple processes that impart our security systems with the adaptability necessary to deal with a wide range of threats.

  Fourth, good ideas in evolution are often identified because they appear nearly exactly the same across many different organisms. Although the DNA codes for millions of different organisms, the basic structure of the molecule and the process by which it replicates itself is the same across much of the living world. Heat shock proteins, which go around the body repairing damaged proteins, are another example, being both present and nearly identical in almost all organisms on Earth. I was amazed when I did some laboratory work studying heat shock proteins in marine snails that I could use commercially available heat shock protein antibodies purified from goats and rabbits to link onto and identify my snails’ heat shock proteins. Many of the biologically inspired ideas I’ll illustrate in this book are not just stab-in-the-dark guesses that happened to work out well, but time-tested billion-year-old solutions that have worked out in the coldest, highest, darkest, hottest, most predator-full and water-starved places on Earth.

  Fifth, good ideas in evolution are also often things that evolve independently multiple times. Eyes, for example, are a good solution for finding your way around in a complex world, but there isn’t one common type of eye that evolved billions of years ago and that we all share. Unlike DNA, this solution came later in Earth’s life history, and it arose independently several times in different types of organisms. Octopuses have incredible eyes that serve the same kinds of functions as our eyes, but they are unique to octopuses. This phenomenon, called convergent evolution, is evidence that evolution is not about taking one design and plopping it down all over, but about solving problems particular to a given organism in a given environment. Throughout this book, I will propose ideas for security that mimic natural solutions, but they may have also been explored by other individuals or organizations which didn’t make any reference to nature at all. I consider these to be examples of convergent evolution—different people trying to solve the problem of how to ensure security in society and coming up with similar solutions. Accordingly, the promise of a biologically inspired approach to security is not that any one finding from nature’s security systems will be a revelation, unheard of among security experts, but rather that biology provides a holistic framework for simultaneously addressing many different types of security problems.

  Finally, and most important, change and variation rule everything in nature. As Charles Darwin mused during his long journey on the Beagle: “Where on the face of the earth can we find a spot, on which close investigation will not discover signs of that endless cycle of change, to which this earth has been, is, and will be subjected?” 3 Darwin was referring to geology, the task he was primarily assigned during his fateful journey, but variation and change were very much at the heart of his subsequent biological studies. He felt it was essential to understand even the most minute variations—such as the microscopic differences between anatomies of the many species of barnacles that he cataloged in an enormous two-volume treatment4—to understand that “mystery of mysteries” of where life comes from. Later biologists would also come to the irreducible conclusion that variation and change were elemental features of nature. Edward Ricketts, the mid-twentieth-century marine biologist and philosopher whose ideas are scattered throughout this book, felt that the variation among organisms was the most important and ineluctable force in the natural world, noting, “Those residua, those most minute differentials, the 0.001 percentages which suffice to maintain the races of sea animals, are seen finally to be the most important things in the world, not because of their sizes, but because th
ey are everywhere. The differential is the true universal, the true catalyst, the cosmic solvent.”5

  Thus, variation catalyzes change, change creates uncertainty, and uncertainty creates insecurity. In a world like ours, no effective security solution can be deployed and not modified or changed with time, because everything around it will be changing. Adaptation to these changes isn’t easy. But the alternative—stasis—isn’t acceptable in a world full of risk, variability, and uncertainty.

  This book takes its guidance from the living world—the only set of examples that has consistently shown an ability to adapt, even to the harshest conditions. The millions of biological organisms on Earth have been adapting to environmental change and catastrophe for 3.5 billion years, a knowledge base unmatched by any human civilization. But before I sound too much like a used species salesman, let me reiterate that it’s not the perfection of this biological history that I admire, but how these species have achieved so much as fundamentally imperfect beings. Biological organisms are like the hillbilly armored vehicles that Specialist Wilson drove in Iraq—cobbled-together collections of adaptations that get replicated when they get the job done, and eliminated when they fail. Accordingly, this book is not about how to develop a perfect solution to a given security problem, but rather about how to develop a flexible system for solving problems, however and wherever they arise.

  This system of natural security won’t be reliant on some new technological advance, although it will utilize technology when needed. It won’t be designed by top government officials, but people at every level of society, including heads of major security agencies, can play a role in making it succeed. And perhaps to the consternation of the Central Intelligence Agency, natural security plans by their nature cannot be classified in any way. Rather, they are laid out in the structure of fossil and living organisms, in fragments of DNA, and in the observable behaviors of the organisms themselves.

  This book uses the building blocks of life to address questions we should be asking about any situation where risk is inevitable and unpredictable in our environment. The book asks: What if we took a whole new approach to risk? One that didn’t try to solve security threats piecemeal or only after they turned catastrophic. One that didn’t waste resources on fixed responses that are useless against changing, intensifying, or intelligent threats. One that didn’t over-prioritize one problem and leave the others unattended. One that rejects the notion that only a few elite “experts” on a certain issue are qualified to analyze it and decide how the rest of us should respond.

  One place to start with this approach is to not be intimidated by the complex tangle our security problems have become, but to look for their simple common roots. Indeed, most security problems, large and small, stem from the same basic problem: the world is full of risk that arises from, and is exacerbated by, variation and uncertainty. The threats to our security today—whether economic, environmental, or existential—are often global risks that take on a huge variety of forms. There is huge uncertainty as to exactly how and when they can harm us or what we can do about them. Acts of terrorism have targeted individuals and large groups; used sniper rifles, bombs, chemicals, and airplanes as weapons; have had political, religious, and personal motivations; and have been committed by men, women, and children from our own and foreign countries. Cyberattacks can occur at any moment and can arise from a single computer or via an autonomous network of computers. And emerging infectious diseases thrive on the inherently variable process of genome replication, which allows suddenly deadly mutations to arise with little warning.

  Even our limited successes against specific examples of these threats only serve to reinforce how difficult it is to control risk, variation, and uncertainty in the world. The eradication of smallpox, which was well worth the investment of about $1 billion in today’s dollars,6 did not eliminate the risk from infectious disease generally. Painstaking intelligence leading to the identification of members of a terrorist cell and their tactics, although critical to reducing the threat of terrorism, doesn’t necessarily tell us much about another cell which may be metastasizing in another, very different part of the world. And the successful evacuation of shorelines after an earthquake, wisely undertaken because we understand something about the relationship between earthquakes and tsunamis, tells us very little about when and where the next earthquake or tsunami will strike.

  Indeed, we might solve our current security problems if it weren’t for risk, variation, and uncertainty. If all terrorist cells or all infectious diseases had the same characteristics, the tactics we applied to one would be effective against all. If tropical storms weren’t intensifying due to climate change, levee walls built to withstand the “100-year flood” (estimated decades ago) would suffice to keep us dry. If risk wasn’t ubiquitous, a one-time, all-out effort to eliminate it when it arose would be an appropriate, even if expensive, use of resources.

  A geologist friend of mine wears a T-shirt that reads, STOP PLATE TECTONICS, which is a tempting way to think about eliminating the ever-present risk of earthquakes. In reality the T-shirt makes a funny (albeit a bit nerdy) statement because the notion of trying to rally public support to stop a global natural phenomenon seems absurd. Yet often we frame our efforts at solving global security issues in terms of eliminating their risk. Cybersecurity has struggled for over forty years to create perfect systems based on the model of “perimeter defense” that tries to keep all risk outside the system, and the result has been a cyberspace that is progressively less secure. 7 We have declared wars on terrorism and drugs—and, in my own field of ecology, a war on invasive species8—and continue to pour resources into them despite neither evidence that they are effective 9 nor a plausible argument for how victory over their underlying risks could even be declared. For example, on the one hand the idea of declaring victory over invasive species—including everything from microbes to algae and mollusks that clog up harbors and waterways to newly imported predators for which local species have no defense—is absurd in a world where anyone (and the microbes, spores, seeds, pests, and pets they intentionally or inadvertently take with them) has the potential to get to almost any other spot on the globe within thirty-six hours10—and millions do every day. On the other hand, if risk, variation, and uncertainty are inevitable, how can we possibly deal with the catastrophic threats that arise from these factors?

  Fortunately, we have at our disposal a vast storehouse of largely untapped knowledge that could guide us in this seemingly intractable quest. It is a massive set of proven solutions, and teachable failures, to the very same problem that unites all of the threats we face—that is, how to survive and thrive in a risky, variable, and uncertain world. Remarkably, this database is completely unclassified and free to use by anyone. The solutions I’m referring to are all contained in the massive diversity of life on Earth—millions of individual living and extinct species, and countless individuals within those species—which have been developing, testing, rejecting, and replicating methods to overcome the challenges of living on a continually changing planet. These organisms have been experiencing security challenges and developing solutions since long before the latest presidential administration or Congress has been working on its agenda, since long before 9/11 finally woke most of us to the new post–Cold War reality, since long before industrialization pushed our biogeochemical cycles into chaos, and since long before humans ever walked the Earth. Indeed, the 3.5-billion-year history of life imbues biological systems with more experience dealing with security problems than any other body of knowledge we possess.

  But because we have incredibly limited communication with all but one species of these millions and millions of natural security experts, how can we tap their knowledge? In some cases, we will have just the raw data to observe and work with—the diverse ecosystems, organisms, cells, and molecules, living in exotic locations and our own backyards, inhabiting our skin, and invading our genome. Still more knowledge can be gleaned from ancient obse
rvations of nature taken since the earliest human societies, from painstaking natural history and evolutionary biology conducted over the 150 years since Darwin’s revolutionary On the Origin of Species, and from the most cutting-edge biological research on protein folding, genome mechanics, and network analysis that have massaged these raw data into stories and models and theories about how biological organisms survive and thrive on a dangerous planet. And because we ourselves are biological creatures, our own species’ evolution and the modern manifestations of that evolutionary process are not only fair game but perhaps the most important set of data to consider. This means that in addition to the ecologists, paleontologists, virologists, and evolutionary biologists who have something novel to contribute to our security debate, so too do the anthropologists, psychologists, soldiers, and first responders who have extensive behavioral observations of people and societies under the stress of insecurity in an uncertain environment.

  The questions that can be answered through observation of nature are the same questions that befuddle us in considering security in society: How can limited resources be allocated effectively between essential but competing needs? How can self-identity that drives individuals to react violently to outsiders—which appears throughout evolutionary history, from the earliest life forms on Earth needing a mechanism to identify viral invaders to the most recent radical religious sects—develop, thrive, and be broken down? How can hostile attacks be avoided or warded off? How can mutually beneficial partnerships be forged between entities that have wildly different and sometimes competing needs?