by Rafe Sagarin
When we start to ask these questions of nature, one thing emerges above all else. That is, despite the massive variation in exactly how biological organisms keep themselves secure, all of these security solutions follow from one very straightforward concept: adaptability. Adaptability is the property of being able to actively and passively alter structures, behaviors, and interactions with other organisms and the non-living world in response to selective pressures. Selective pressures could be any change in the environment—climate warming, predators, a disease, limitations on available living space, competition for mates, overpopulation, failure of a food source. Organisms adapt within their own lifetimes (animals of the far north grow white coats in snow-covered months and mottled coats in the summer) and across generations (the evolutionary transition from aquatic reptiles to air-breathing amphibians) as those better-adapted variants mate more frequently or produce stronger offspring. In the loosest terms, adaptability occurs across all levels of biology. Individuals rich in “good genes” survive better. Species with a lot of well-adapted individuals stay on Earth longer. Ecosystems don’t adapt as a monolithic whole, but those rich in adaptable species show amazing resilience to ecological change.11
Adaptability sounds intuitively attractive to anyone who has witnessed catastrophic failure of our security systems. Not surprisingly, many post-mortems of security disasters such as 9/11, insurgencies in Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina wholeheartedly endorse the concept of adaptability.12 When I meet with security practitioners, from federal air marshals to TSA agents, Coast Guard, fire, and police chiefs, and FBI staff, it’s clear that they have all been ordered, or have given orders, to be more adaptable in their practice. But “Be Adaptable” has been thrown around like a marketing slogan with few specifics to back it up. The problem is that on the one hand, government agencies have little experience or knowledge about how to be adaptable; and, on the other hand, although individuals—especially first responders and ordinary civilians in a time of crisis13—have shown remarkable adaptability, they often lack the resources or the power to replicate their adaptive behaviors across much larger swathes of society. Thus, their actions are seen as somewhat anomalous examples of grace under pressure—at best, they get a nod on the evening news as “real life heroes” before the commercial break.
This book intends to draw out from natural organisms, the undisputed world’s experts on the subject, exactly how they incorporate adaptability into their own survival and suggest how we can, with our clever brains, deliberately incorporate adaptability into our personal and societal security systems without having to wait for the long march of evolution to get us there.
The real benefit of a biological approach is that it is the only framework I know of that can be applied consistently from security analysis to planning to implementation, and across the broad spectrum of security concerns. Nonetheless, my own limitations and my publisher’s ensure that I cannot be equally broad in my coverage of natural security. There are necessarily security issues that get more (terrorism, homeland security) or less (food security, cybersecurity) treatment in this book, but my failure to adequately cover a particular issue should not be seen as any evaluation I’ve made as to which are the most important security concerns. Because I believe the same problems of adaptability apply to any situation where there is unpredictable risk, I have tried to use the most salient and sometimes the most provocative examples to illustrate various points.
My approach will arise from several different perspectives through the course of the book. At times I will simply lay out an argument, backed by both time-tested and cutting-edge research from a wide range of fields in ecology, evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, economics, and computer science, to make the connection between adaptation and security. Other times, I will let nature speak for itself (often through octopuses!), using the remarkable range of security measures taken by biological organisms to expand our own narrow sense of what is possible. And (usually playing the role of the hapless foil, but sometimes to demonstrate just how clever we can be) I will put human behaviors and the behaviors of our institutions (which often seem to be their own beasts) under the spotlight to expose how terribly far we may have strayed from our roots as a highly adaptable species.
There is no one model for how I present these ideas. Sometimes an animal model is completely sufficient to demonstrate the right way to make an adaptable security system. Other times, more subtle explanations are necessary. Sometimes humans are truly extraordinary and deserving of their place in the spotlight. In some cases, the translation from nature to humans will be straightforward. For example, DNA works the same in octopuses as it does in us. Other times, I will be making analogies that require a considerable stretch of the imagination or may simply not work for you, and that’s fine. My goal is not to say that we are just like everything else in nature and therefore let’s start acting accordingly, but to suggest that by opening our minds a bit to processes and patterns in nature we might find new ways to tackle long-standing challenges.
I hope the structure of the book in small part resembles adaptable biological systems, by focusing first and foremost on the problem at hand and then bringing to bear whatever tools are available to solve it. In a larger sense we will likewise have to throw out all of our preconceived notions and projections and focus directly on the immediate problems we face if we are to have any chance of creating truly adaptable security systems.
Nonetheless, because a book, unlike an ecosystem, can be planned, there is a logical order to my presentation. The next chapter begins our investigation, appropriately enough, in a tide pool. Like my scientific hero, Ed “Doc” Ricketts, who helped his friend John Steinbeck see that the whole world was contained in the tide pools of Cannery Row, I find that all the major lessons for natural security are there—oozing, fighting, stalking, and spawning in the tide pools where I got my start as a scientist—so they provide a good overview for the specific lessons that follow. I then drill down into one of the fundamental forces of life and adaptation, which is learning from the environment. Here I particularly stress the oddly undervalued power of learning from success. Both organisms and organizations learn to adapt better when they are organized adaptably. Chapter 4 untangles this tongue twister by identifying a consistent pattern in nature—the rejection of centralized control in favor of multiple semi-independent agents that individually solve problems as they arise in the environment. In Chapter 5 I show how nature turns the concept of redundancy—a term that instantly makes us think of waste, bureaucracy, and mass layoffs—on its head, because the type of “creative redundancy” found everywhere in nature is actually a vital force for survival and adaptation. In the subsequent chapter, I remind us that all this fabulous adaptable ability has consequences—it leads inevitably to adaptation amongst one’s enemies—so that the history of life is peppered with episodes of escalation toward ever more clever and deadly adaptations and counter-adaptations. This escalation would quickly get out of hand if it weren’t for channels of communication that have opened among and between organisms. Chapter 7 is about how information is used in the natural world to create uncertainty and to mitigate uncertainty, to create conflict and to avoid it. In Chapter 8 I get reflective, considering our own human adaptations and their roles, both positive and negative, in the security threats we face. Here it’s the human animal, in both its typical form as a hunter-gatherer, and in its bizarre new manifestation as a city dweller living in an evolutionary cocoon, that provides the lessons for our continued survival. I then turn to the most powerful and underappreciated lesson for survival, which is that no organism, human or otherwise, does it alone. Perhaps because it initially seems so facile to say that cooperation is essential, we tend to overlook the power of cooperative, or symbiotic, relationships, yet they are everywhere in nature and vastly underutilized in society. In Chapter 10, inspired by the old swamp-dwelling proto-environmentalist cartoon organism Pogo, I remind us that we are our own worst enemy,
wasting vast resources to create artificial and wholly inadaptable security systems right on top of living security systems that nature provided to us absolutely free. I close the book by acknowledging that security issues are only one small target for applying lessons from natural adaptability. Dealing with the effects of climate change, steering a business through a volatile world of bulls and bears, even teaching science to a troupe of K–12 students, are all areas where a static mindset will lead to devastating consequences and understanding adaptability may be the only way to survive and thrive in the twenty-first century.
chapter two
TIDE-POOL SECURITY
FISH DON’T TRY to turn sharks into vegetarians. Living immersed in a world of constant risk forces the fish to develop multiple ways of living with risk, rather than try to eliminate it. The fish can dash away from the shark in a burst of speed, live in places sharks can’t reach, use deceptive coloration to hide from the shark, form schools with other fish to confuse the shark, it can even form an alliance with the shark, and all of these things may help the fish solve the problem of how to avoid getting eaten by the shark. But none of these adaptations will help the fish solve the general problem of predation, and it doesn’t need to. The fish doesn’t have to be a perfect predator-avoidance machine. Like every single one of the countless organisms it shares a planet with, the fish just has to be good enough to survive and reproduce itself.
Like the environment of fish and sharks, the world we spend our daily lives in is also full of risk. Acts of terrorism that seem to come out of nowhere. Wars that have carried on too long and show little progress toward resolution. Intensifying natural disasters fueled by global changes in climate. A distribution of food that leaves billions undernourished1 and millions of others facing an obesity epidemic. A cyber infrastructure that we’ve become increasingly dependent upon that has also become increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic attack. New diseases and new mutations of old diseases that threaten to become global pandemics. The major threats society faces today are ominous and complex interplays of human behavior and environmental change, global politics and local acts of cruelty or carelessness, historical accidents, and long-simmering tensions. Some of these threats have plagued us as long as we have been human, and yet we’ve still made little progress against them; others are becoming more dangerous in synergy with rapid climatic and political changes; and still others are just now emerging.
Yet the responses we have been offered or forced to accept by the experts we’ve entrusted to solve these problems often seem frustratingly ineffective, naïve, or just plain ridiculous. When increased body screening of airline passengers was implemented after 9/11, Richard Reid attempted to destroy an airliner with a bomb in his shoe; and when shoes began to be screened in response to Reid’s attack, al-Qaeda plotted to use a liquid explosive attack; and when liquids were banned, Umar Abdulmutallab used a powdered incendiary hidden in his underwear in an attempted attack. Far from any airport, on a tiny island in the tiny town of Beaufort, North Carolina, there is a tiny outpost of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Although I lack high-level security clearances, I’m fairly certain this little laboratory—which studies fish and coastal ecology—is not on any terrorist group’s list of targets. Yet when the NOAA coastal scientists wanted to renovate and add some space a few years back, they were forced by the Department of Homeland Security to install enormous Walmart-style parking lot lights on their facility as a required security measure. This was ironic, since the scientists working at the lab know full well that nighttime light pollution is a major threat to the ecology of the same coastal marine environments that they are paid by taxpayers to study.2
Life on Earth has a lot to show us about how to create more adaptable systems than these, but with the doors to this vast pool of expertise on adaptability blown open, a daunting new question emerges: Where to begin? There are millions of species on Earth, each with its own special adaptations that themselves change within an individual’s lifetime and over generations. Moreover, each individual of each species has its own unique quirks, aspects that make it slightly more or slightly less well-adapted to the particular environment in which it finds itself. In nature there are wings and eyes and claws and stingers and killer viruses and helpful bacteria, thirteen-year-long naps and 5,000-foot deep sea dives, suits of armor and solar energy factories, stolen poisons, and secret coded messages all working in some way to aid the adaptability and security of their owners. So, where would be a good place to start discovering which of these things would be useful to help solve our own security problems?
If you want to learn about security and adaptability from nature, I can think of no better place to start than a tide pool. It is the environment in which my career as a biologist developed, as a child during endless hours in sand flats and marshes of Cape Cod Bay, and later as a student and researcher in the great tide pools of Monterey and Pacific Grove. And it was in those same Pacific tide pools—where I retreated with my wife and infant daughter to get away from the horrible televised images on the morning of September 11, 2001—that I had the first inklings of an idea that they would be useful in studying security.
Tide pools are a good place to start studying natural security precisely because they are so full of life. The rocky shores of the North and South American Pacific coasts and the kelp forests that thrive just offshore are some of the most diverse and biologically productive ecosystems on Earth. And because they are so full of life, they are accordingly full of struggle for survival—millions of individual organisms each trying to compete for mates, find a preciously limited space to live in, forage for food, and not get eaten while coping with a dynamic and harsh environment.
Nestled between the edge of a continent and the fierce and relentless ocean, tide-pool organisms experience some of the most dangerous physical forces on Earth, and the greatest variation in those forces. At times the roiling surf crashes against the rocks with enough power to kill a person. A limpet, which is a small snail with a cone-shaped shell that lives abundantly on rocky shores, must withstand both the crushing pressure of these monster waves and the hydrodynamic lift that threatens to yank the little snail off the rocks as the water rushes over its body. Fronds of algae must grip iron-tight to bare rock yet be flexible enough to whip back and forth in the frothing brine, which brings them essential nutrients. A starfish uses thousands of suction-cup–like hydraulic feet to crawl around, pry open mussel shells, and devour them without getting washed to sea. The mussels themselves cling tenaciously to the rock by means of a few slender byssal threads, a remarkable natural material that makes human engineers crazed with envy because it is made in the relatively cold temperature of seawater and is at the same time stiffly resistant to abrasion and highly stretchable to accommodate a huge range of forces.3
Only a few hours later, when the tide recedes, the scene of that violent struggle for survival against physical and biological threats has transformed into a silent and serene little pool of ocean water trapped between the rocks. But as deadly as the high tide’s waves might have been, the dryness, exposure, and searing heat of low tide may be worse. Now, on the high dry rocks above the isolated tide pool, many animals are hunkered down with a tiny store of water under shell or carapace to keep them alive. Seagulls and oystercatchers—and at night, the occasional cat, raccoon, or rat—are on the prowl, so the exposed animals need to hold on tight, hide in deep crevices, or settle into their home spot, a perfectly shaped scar they’ve scraped away into the rock with no room for a prying beak or scratching claw. Barnacles, which waved hand-like appendages to catch food in the ocean currents when the tide was up, now retreat into their citadel homes and slam four perfectly fitted doors shut against the sun and the predators. As the dryness and heat increase, all these organisms are responding not just with their bodies but within their cells as well. The proteins that allow them to carry out their daily activities are starting to melt, losing the precise structure the
y need to bind other chemicals and create metabolic reactions in the body. So while the organisms appear lifeless, they are frantically producing special “heat-shock proteins” that run around the body squeezing those failing proteins back into the right shape,4 so they’ll be ready to react when the cool water returns.
Below the surface of the tide pool, which at first appears as quiet as the rocks surrounding it, life is abuzz. I tell students on their first tide-pool visits not to move too much, but rather sit and watch the tide pool come to life. Soon something that looked like a pebble darts across the pool, a well-camouflaged tide-pool sculpin patrolling for a meal. Another quick flash reveals a shrimp, which doesn’t need camouflage because its transparent body is nearly invisible in seawater. After some time watching, the comical circling and climbing and scuffling of hermit crabs resolves into something a little more sensible: the crabs, which protect themselves with borrowed snail shells, are sizing up any shell they can find, looking for a larger upgrade for their growing bodies. A flower-like anemone, lime green and fuchsia, waits quietly for its next meal to drift, or stumble carelessly, into its deadly tentacles with their thousands of harpoon-like stinging cells poised like an army in ambush. A glorious nudibranch—a snail that lacks the protection of an outer shell—ostentatiously winds its way across the anemone clad in its own stunning array of colors, and coolly stops for a meal. It will ingest some of those stinging cells intact, conscripting the little soldiers to use in its own defenses. The naïve predator that tries to eat the vulnerable-looking nudibranch will meet the strike of a stolen anemone stinger.
