Learning From the Octopus

by Rafe Sagarin

  As a child and budding marine biologist, I was also fascinated with mutually assured destruction. But I observed it in the salt marshes of Cape Cod Bay, where I could watch fiddler crabs for hours. These are small crabs that live in large colonies in burrows on the edge of marshes. The males are distinctive in that they grow one enormous claw, which they wave menacingly at other males in displays. Two males competing for a female will wave their large claw at one another until one of them backs down and the other claims the spoils of victory. The crabs apparently have an incredible innate capacity to size up one another’s claws, because the one that backs down is almost invariably the one with the smaller claw. But oddly enough, they rarely, if ever, fight with these huge weapons of destruction. It’s as if they implicitly understand that full-scale claw-to-claw combat would leave them both battered and unable to feed or mate.

  Fiddler crab security works in the following situations: (1) where both sides of the conflict have similar resources (neither crab has the ability to suddenly grow three times as big as the other), (2) where both sides of the conflict adapt in similar ways (neither crab is able to suddenly grow wings and attack the other from the sky), and (3) where both parties share a common end goal (both crabs want to win a female to mate with).

  In other words, this kind of stability-inducing conflict has nothing in common with today’s security problems. Almost all of today’s security problems deal with unequal resources (e.g., al-Qaeda vs. the U.S. Department of Defense; failing subsistence farms in Kenya vs. massively subsidized U.S. corn), unequal pathways of adaptation (insurgents changing practices on the fly vs. a U.S. Army forced to follow “SOPs”), and different end goals (hackers trying to cause cyber chaos vs. you trying to finish your report by the close of business).

  All this inequality and disparity of goals creates imbalance and instability, when what we’d ideally like in any security situation is stability. Fiddler crabs and MAD give us a nice model of stability, but it’s a fairly narrow one pertinent to a particular set of historic and evolutionary contingencies. Though I still have an inordinate fondness for fiddler crabs, I’ve had to move beyond them in my biological studies in order to begin to understand biological complexity. The Cold War, like fiddler crabs to a budding marine biologist, is a fascinating focus of conflict studies and history, but it’s hardly representative of the current state of complexity.

  Are there more general models of stability in nature? We might immediately think so, having been inundated throughout history with soothing words from poets, writers, politicians, and environmentalists of “harmonious nature” and the “balance of nature.” From a scientific standpoint, my colleagues in ecology have been looking for the existence of “stable states” for decades. Do they exist? If you squint enough—that is, look from far enough away, don’t get into the details too much, and paint in broad strokes—you can see stable states in ecology. But most ecologists now acknowledge that stable states are a good abstract generalization that helps us think about changes of various levels of severity, but stability can’t possibly describe real ecological systems at the fine scale.2

  The tide pools I study at Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey are still much more like they were when I first saw them in 1993 than like they were when they were first studied by Willis Hewatt in 1930. The overwhelming signal of change between the early study and our later studies seems to be related to warming climate. There might be a temptation to say that the tide-pool community, after a period of struggling with warmer temperatures, has reached some climate-changed steady state. But I know from my frequent visits that even within the realm of a tide-pool community more dominated by warm-water animals, there are frequent changes in who is dominant and who is on the verge of disappearing, who has taken over the most space on the rocks, and who saw a brief period of flourishing populations but is now on the wane. I’d be very nervous to use the word stability around my tide pools or any other ecological system.

  True, there are general patterns that can be used to describe certain ecological landscapes. I can say “oak-chaparral woodland,” and any ecologist and many Californians will have a fairly similar picture in their head of dry grasses, grayish-green shrubs, and gnarled oak trees scattered up a hillside. But look a little closer and some of those woodlands will be guarded in various places by squawking red-winged blackbirds perched on invasive fennel stalks, and others will be on the verge of collapse as a winemaker’s bulldozer seeks to expand its winery’s vines yet further, and others will be blighted by sudden oak death.3 Ecologists may say I’m cheating by invoking bulldozers and other impacts of humans on a pure ecological concept, but the impacts of humans have become inseparable from nearly every ecosystem on Earth, so if ecological landscapes are not stable in the face of human intervention, they’re just not stable. This is the world we live in.

  So, what about human-created ecosystems? If we can create ecological instability everywhere on Earth, is there anywhere we can create stability? That is, can deliberate attempts to merge nature and technology create stable, self-sustaining biomes? I’ve seen small glass globes with some water, algae, and maybe an invertebrate like a small shrimp sold (usually in the SkyMall catalog) as self-sustaining ecosystems. But even those get an influx of sunlight, and on the scale of sustaining interest they fall somewhere between tic-tac-toe and a goldfish. In other words, they lack the complexity of real ecosystems.

  A much more interesting experiment in stability was conducted in the desert not far from my home in Tucson. There, Texas oil heir and environmentalist Edward Bass financed the creation of a massive glass greenhouse that was to house eight humans and everything they needed to live for a two-year period. The Biosphere 2 (named as a sequel to Biosphere 1, planet Earth) mission drew huge publicity and ultimately some notoriety, as rumors of tribal infighting amid crop failure and malnutrition among the “Biospherians” surfaced. A number of technical issues emerged, like excesses of carbon dioxide caused by out-gassing from the concrete foundation. From a biological standpoint, ecological interactions didn’t play out as they did in the much larger landscape of planet Earth. Pollinators died out, and cockroaches took over.4

  Biosphere 2 is now managed by the University of Arizona as an experimental facility. A visit to Biosphere 2 leaves one gasping at the audacity of its original plan in the face of the overwhelming complexity of recreating the Earth’s living biosphere. Simultaneously, you get both a tantalizing feeling of how close it might have come to achieving its dream—the plant life appears as lush and abundant as the Garden of Eden—and many reminders (like condensation dripping down every wall and electrical junction box of the musty subterranean mechanical infrastructure) of just how much farther they had to go. It remains an amazing structure for experimentally exploring things like plant growth under a climate-warmed world, but no one still harbors any illusions that it can function as a closed, stable self-sustaining ecosystem.

  Thus, even ecosystems that are persistent enough to be named (“rocky intertidal,” “oak chaparral”) are not that stable, and the chimeras of human technology and ecology are even less so. Have I drawn too strict a boundary around the concept of stability? Any decision to define the rules of stability will be fairly arbitrary, but just for argument, let’s say that a system that has stuck around in its present condition for millions of years makes a pretty good case for itself that it is indeed relatively stable. Geerat Vermeij cites the example of deep-sea brachiopods—ancient invertebrates that sort of resemble a clam on a stalk. They haven’t changed much from their fossilized ancestors. They live harmoniously in the quiet deep sea, but like the sealed glass “ecospheres” sold in the SkyMall, they’re not all that interesting. Or, to use Vermeij’s more precise analogy, they lack economic power. That is, they don’t command a lot of biological resources; they don’t expand out of their narrow niche, they don’t cause changes in other species, and they don’t move mountains.

  Could we find blissful stability in society? In a world
of food insecurity, cyberattacks, terrorism, and terrifying natural disasters, there is something appealing about the simple life of a deep-sea brachiopod, unchanged for millions of years in its silent world where it gets everything it needs and nothing more. I imagine, for the right price, there are little goat cheese farms in southern France or Belgium that you might buy and achieve something of this existence. You could live like the little shrimp in the ecosphere, more or less getting your daily needs met, maybe trading some goat cheese for a baguette and some marmalade. It sounds lovely. For a week or two. Until you got a craving for cow cheese, or, God forbid, a Big Mac. And even life in the glass sphere has to change. I met a man in far upstate New York who bought a grove of sugar maples and hoped to get away from it all through a life of making maple syrup. Unfortunately, climate warming has invaded his stable retreat, forcing him to continually adjust his sapping dates, which once were stable enough to be fixed in north woods lore.

  Unless we’d like to live in a country or a little village that never learns, never grows, never trades with outsiders, and never brings new people in or sends people out, we are unlikely to learn much from the rare stable states in nature.

  BEYOND STABILITY-ESCALATION

  Stability in international affairs, even the tenuous trigger-point stability of the Cold War, is likewise rare and exceptional. Even for much of the Cold War we didn’t necessarily think a nuclear conflict was unwinnable. In War Games, the computer learned about MAD in a couple of tension-filled minutes in the multiplex. In reality, the superpowers learned about MAD and ultimately came to accept it much more slowly. In the 1960s John F. Kennedy effectively turned the ominous concept of a “missile gap”—the number of fewer nuclear missiles the United States supposedly had relative to the Soviets—into a campaign weapon. Civil defense public service announcements insinuated that it was a patriotic duty to learn to survive the initial impact of a nuclear strike so as to be able to rebuild American democracy afterward. Nuclear survival drills were routinely part of my elementary education up until the late 1970s.

  It was essentially a series of ecological studies that put an end to nuclear war survival scenarios and kept the concept of MAD pertinent until the end of the Cold War. First, in 1980, a clever interpretation of many layers of geological, climatological, and paleontological data assembled by a father-and-son team—Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son Walter—revealed a wholly plausible theory to explain the mystery of why the dinosaurs disappeared at the boundary of the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods 65 million years ago.5 The Alvarezes contended that a large impact from an extraterrestrial object could have created huge firestorms and dust clouds so dense as to block significant solar radiation for an extended period of time, killing off photosynthetic plant life and especially large organisms dependent on this life. The evidence at the time was circumstantial—one major clue was a geologic layer of iridium found in many sites throughout the world corresponding to the geologic age of the extinction event. Iridium is extremely rare at the surface of the Earth. Its most likely source in such quantity to be available throughout the world at the same time is an extraterrestrial asteroid, some of which have been found to be enriched in iridium. Although the Alvarez team and their colleagues could not at the time provide the smoking gun of a crater large enough to indicate such an impact, such a crater was discovered ten years later using advanced technology, hiding a kilometer underground in the Yucatan Peninsula region of Mexico.6

  Because everyone is captivated by dinosaurs, or at least knows a young boy or girl who is, the unraveling of their mysterious disappearance was one of the hottest science stories of the time. The idea that forces of nature, not just some tooth-and-claw combat to the death, could fell all those mighty giants and fundamentally change the face of the Earth was both captivating and terrifying. This new view of nature’s dynamics acting on a global scale essentially greased the wheels for widespread acceptance of the subsequent “nuclear winter” theory, which would outline the extinction not of our long-passed reptilian ancestors, but of humans themselves. Presented in a 1983 paper by a team of well-established physicists including the widely known Carl Sagan,7 the theory suggested that the simultaneous explosion of multiple nuclear warheads, as could be expected in a conflict between the United States and the USSR, would lead to massive firestorms and a significant decrease in incoming solar radiation due to dust in the atmosphere. The resulting global cooling would kill off virtually all life on Earth. The idea that such a global extinction was possible was already well-primed in the public imagination. The dinosaur story even posited roughly the same mechanism; the only difference was the delivery vehicle—an intercontinental ballistic missile rather than an asteroid.

  As people will do, there were different reactions to the nuclear winter scenario. All considered it an appalling and unacceptable end to the Cold War, but, as expected, there were different reactions to the nuclear winter scenario. Advocates of disarmament used it to bolster their cause, arguing that the consequences of even a small number of nuclear strikes were too terrible to allow for any policy but complete drawdown of the missiles. More hawkish types, such as President Ronald Reagan, used this frightening outcome to justify a seemingly simple solution—a missile defense shield above the Earth that would destroy nuclear weapons out in the harmless vacuum of space, before they could cause the type of global destruction that the nuclear winter scenario foretold. It was a vision of pure science fiction, echoed in the nickname it quickly acquired—Star Wars—after the immensely popular movies of the time. But its reality was science fiction, too, since long before and long after Reagan’s time.

  In the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., there is inadvertently some record of how long the dream of a true missile defense shield has gone unrealized. There, next to a replica of the Explorer I satellite, on a framed January 31, 1958, newspaper front page displayed to commemorate the U.S. entry into the space race, is a small article set off to the side and below the fold commenting that the United States was to begin development of a missile defense system. Thus began two races of escalation with very different outcomes. Just over ten years after the rocket launch that put Explorer I into orbit, the United States proudly sent men to the moon, beating out the Russians, who up until that point had preceded the United States in nearly every major step toward that goal. By contrast, fifty years after embarking on a missile defense plan, the United States still has nothing close to a workable missile defense system.

  I tend to be a technological optimist—I’d like to think that given enough time and money, some of the most difficult technological problems can be solved. In that sense, I’m sympathetic to the missile defense supporters who argue that past failures and slow progress are no reason that missile defense can’t work. My concerns about missile defense are much more organic. First, all organisms must balance resources—the creature that spends too much energy on defense won’t have enough left to forage for more food or to mate. Although at times it seems like we have infinite resources for defense projects, we don’t, and missile defense has been sucking up a large portion of those resources for some time now. But the second organic argument against missile defense, more germane to this chapter, is that missile defense creates a dangerous escalation where you once had a rare instance of stability.

  Missile defense creates escalation through several pathways, none of which are good for security. It creates an incentive to produce more missiles, under the strategy that even a working missile defense system can only shoot down some fraction of the incoming missiles, not all of them, so you might overcome such a defense through sheer numbers. Of course, few nuclear-capable regimes have the capacity to produce many nuclear-armed missiles. For these regimes, which are typically the “rogue” nations and entities like North Korea and Iran that we are most concerned about, two other escalatory options remain. They can produce more deadly weapons, such as missiles that disperse their nuclear payload int
o multiple warheads that spread destructive impacts, or at least lethal radiation, over a larger area. Alternatively, and more cheaply, they can choose to deliver the nuclear payload by something other than a missile, such as in a bomb smuggled inside our borders in a shipping container. These adaptations may happen without nuclear defense, but a nuclear defense system virtually ensures that they will happen. Missile defense essentially serves as an enzyme to speed up the escalatory process.

  Arms control advocates early on recognized the escalatory power of building up defenses. That is one of the reasons why both early nuclear reduction treaties and proposed treaties such as the “New START” treaty between the United States and Russia specifically outlaw defensive structures such as hardened missile silos or defensive weapons launched from offensive silos or submarines. 8 Nonetheless, the apparent need for missile defense has become so dogmatic in the United States that politicians and pundits from the left, right, and center consider any attempts to curtail the development of missile defense non-starters for future non-proliferation treaties.

  LIVING WITH ESCALATION

  Accordingly, with us hell-bent on creating escalation even out of stability, and with few natural models of stability to guide us anyway, we need to understand how to survive and thrive in a constantly escalating world. We need to look where conflict still brews, where armaments and defenses get yet more deadly and more effective, and where strategies get ever cleverer; where the tiniest organisms can wreak havoc on the most powerful leviathans, where senescent creatures suddenly awake and throw their once-placid surroundings into turmoil. Fortunately, this describes just about all of nature, so we have a lot of material to choose from, but where do we start looking?