Learning From the Octopus

by Rafe Sagarin

  We could start by staring deep into the looking glass. That is, we can take a page from Lewis Carroll’s fantasy Through the Looking Glass, where we find the Red Queen warning Alice, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Biologists have seized on this comment as convenient shorthand for the daily adaptational struggles of organisms. The “Red Queen hypothesis” states that in order to maintain the same level of fitness, or ability to survive and reproduce, relative to one’s competitors and antagonists, an organism must keep adapting. The logical outcome of Red Queen dynamics is an evolutionary arms race in which opposing sides continually increase speeds, armaments, defenses, and tactics, sometimes exploiting whole new resources, in order to be able to survive and thrive.

  Surely this type of escalation cannot sustain itself forever? As it turns out, 3.5 billion years of experience with life on Earth tells us that it can. Billions of years ago, very few ecological niches were exploited. That is, most of the places organisms could live were still empty. The type of energy systems now used by organisms were almost completely untapped. There were abundant openings for the jobs of predators, prey, carrion feeders, and parasites. Fast swimming, flying, running, and swinging from trees that hadn’t yet evolved to exploit untapped areas for photosynthesis were inventions still billions of years off. But all of these places and ways of living—ecological niches—would ultimately become filled. Much of this niche filling happened during brief explosive periods of diversification, especially around 550 million years ago, when most of the basic body plans of animals emerged. Then again, about 489 million years ago many new species within those basic body plans emerged, and they stretched out from the sea floor and began to dig into the sediments and explore the water above.9 This increasing exploitation of different niches throughout evolutionary time is a really good indication of escalation between organisms. If there was no reason to grow higher to compete for light or avoid herbivory, we wouldn’t have trees. If there was not a vicious battle for resources in the seas and abundant unexploited plant life on land, we probably wouldn’t have gotten amphibians. It is true that sometimes, outside forces like asteroids and ice ages wreaked changes far more powerful than the day-to-day arms races, creating mass-extinction events in several cases. Yet after every one of these events, life, and its attendant escalation, rocketed back.

  Because much of this evidence of escalation is indirect, Geerat Vermeij sought to take one thick slice of geologic history—the past 550 million years or so—and test three specific hypotheses, using actual animal fossils, to see if arms races and escalation did occur.10 Vermeij looked at whether traits relevant to antipredatory or competitive ability, like thick shells or strong claws, became more common through time. He then looked at the “adaptive gap” between organisms’ capabilities and their environments to see if, through time, organisms have become better adapted to their environment. Finally, he looked to see whether the biological hazards of competition and predation have become more severe over time. Vermeij’s findings from the rich store of fossils he studied confirmed what general trends suggested for the entire history of life—it gets harder and harder to survive on Earth, but this struggle drives unparalleled innovation and unimaginable diversity.

  Consider how this plays out in nature. Sea anemones were among the first multicellular life forms on Earth, not that far removed from sponges. They have a pretty simple way of going about their business. They are basically a voracious mouth surrounded by a ring of tentacles. They are supported and attached to the rocks by a soft fleshy stalk. They stay in one place waiting for food drifting in the water to flow by their mouth or get stuck in their outstretched tentacles. But as coastal seas became more crowded with predators and even other anemones, their soft body and sessile nature made them fairly vulnerable. So through time they developed stinging cells in their tentacles, which, like the best of adaptations, serve a multitude of functions. They can stun or kill live prey, they protect the anemone from predators, and they even ward off competing anemones who might try to take their prime real estate on the rocks. With certain clonal anemones, you can see a bare rock “demilitarized zone,” like the line between North and South Korea, between two growing colonies that use stinging cells to repel one another when they meet. In addition to developing stinging cells, some of the anemone line split off and became free-living jellyfish—thus exploiting a whole new niche of the open ocean.

  These innovations in turn helped to drive innovations among completely unrelated species. Out at sea, the homely Mola mola (ocean sunfish) evolved to exploit the niche created by teeming numbers of jellyfish in the open ocean. Back on the coastal rocks, where the struggle for life is perhaps as fierce as anywhere on Earth, biological escalation, some of it in response to the armament of anemones, drove some remarkable adaptations. Under the extreme predatory pressures of the rocky shore, even the stinging cells of the anemone became a whole new niche to exploit. Specifically, nudibranchs, or sea slugs, developed the ability to ingest anemone stinging cells whole and use them in their own defense.

  In human tide pools—those environments of extreme escalation, such as a theatre of war, humans also expropriate their enemies’ armaments for their own ends. Much of the explosive materials now used in IEDs that are deployed against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan can be traced to weapons caches left by the Soviets after their long and unsuccessful occupation of Afghanistan. In general, insurgents are a particularly vexing problem for regular armies to fight, because they seem to play the escalation game so well. Ground observations by counterinsurgency officers show that the average time for insurgent fighters to adapt to new tactics, techniques, or procedures of U.S. troops is about fourteen days.11 U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates remarked with frustration at a congressional hearing in March 2007 that “as soon as we . . . find one way of trying to thwart their efforts, [the insurgents] find a technology or a new way of going about their business.”12

  Observations like these have prompted speculation that insurgencies can adapt faster than regular armies, such that in essence we will always be in a losing situation. This immediate reaction ignores the fact that at the ground level, soldiers and platoons in regular armies adapt pretty well themselves. Naval Postgraduate School counterinsurgency expert James Russell says it’s “nonsense” to reflexively describe insurgencies as more creative, flexible, or adaptable.13 Moreover, speed of adaptation is not the same thing as effective adaptation. In nature, adaptation happens at a huge range of speeds. It is certainly not only the gradual accumulation of change across millions of years of evolution, as many believe. Detailed studies of Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos have shown that natural selection acts rapidly on each finch species’ adaptations for different types of food sources.14 Flowering plants adapt toward self-pollination within a few generations when they lose their pollinating insects.15

  The point is that what matters is not the speed of adaptation, but what problems it helps you solve and what problems arise as a result of an enemy’s adaptations. As Michael Kenney found in analyzing escalation between drug-trafficking “narcos” and the law enforcement “narcs” who try to stop them, “[trafficking networks] enjoy a number of advantages over their state competitors—among them stronger incentives to adapt, smaller coordination costs, flatter organizational structures, and fewer institutional impediments to action. These advantages influence, but do not determine, outcomes in competitive adaptation.”16 Colleagues of mine are currently poring through data on insurgencies to really pin down whether they adapt faster or not, but what is relevant is that they adapt fast enough to require us to adapt ourselves, and they adapt differently. It would at least be useful to understand why they adapt differently.

  Indeed, variation and difference between two entities involved in an escalating evolution is always the key to understanding what drives the escalation. Whereas the rare cases of evolutionary stability arise from the similarity between organisms (the fiddler crabs cl
aws are so close in size), evolutionary escalation of conflict occurs because of the differences between them. I’ll focus here on three important sources of differences between escalating organisms: the resources available to either side, the motivation to change in either side, and the way in which each side uses information and communicates.

  Difference in resources seems like an obvious source for adaptation and change. Shouldn’t the organism with more resources at its disposal be able to evolve more rapidly? At least, shouldn’t the better-resourced side feel more secure? It would seem that if we have a lot of money, we can buy a lot of different things to ensure our survival—fire extinguishers and burglar alarms and bulletproof glass and expensive Swedish cars with five-star safety ratings and maybe a few bodyguards as well. The Powell Doctrine, which guided the U.S. military’s initial foray into Iraq, buys into this logic. The doctrine stated that the United States should not enter a conflict unless it has overwhelmingly superior resources to apply to the job. In part this doctrine was engendered by interpretations of the failures of the Vietnam War that asserted that the United States simply did not apply enough resources to the battle. But just as Powell’s assertion before the United Nations that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction turned out to be a poor reflection of the situation on the ground, the Powell Doctrine was poorly matched to the way the war escalated in Iraq. The utility of an overwhelming force doctrine was justified in the lead-up to the war by (it turns out later) hyper-inflated assessments of the abilities of Saddam Hussein’s elite conventional forces. In reality, the fearsome Republican Guard crumbled easily under moderate pressure—no overwhelming force was needed—but the defeat of the conventional forces opened a new chapter of insurgency, for which superior resources were of little value.

  Even a cursory glance at nature tells us that it is foolish to think that resources are enough to come out ahead in evolutionary escalations. Viruses mutate with very few resources yet cause huge security issues for vastly better resourced humans. And small individual organisms that each use few resources, like locusts, can wreak havoc when their actions are matched by millions of other individuals. We have poured billions of dollars and countless hours of research effort into developing herbicides, pesticides, and antibacterial agents, yet the results are numbingly similar every time. The weeds, the bugs, and the microbes, each with very few resources, come back stronger, more destructive, and more deadly than ever. A quick glance at the news shows us the results of these escalations in which the far less resourced side is decidedly winning. Farmers, after years of applying the supposedly harmless herbicide Roundup, are now resorting to ever more toxic chemicals and more destructive tilling practices to deal with outbreaks of Roundup-resistant “superweeds.”17 Bedbugs, once the scourge of city dwellers but long since disappeared from the American consciousness, are now resurgent, aided by increased global travel and their acquired resistance to previously effective pesticides.18 And hospitals, where antibacterial agents are used liberally, are actually ground zero for outbreaks of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, a deadly and debilitating disease that has become resistant to almost all known antibiotics.19

  Likewise, in human affairs there is abundant evidence that resources do not determine the outcome of conflicts. The 9/11 attacks, which caused untold billions of dollars of damage, not to mention thousands of lives lost, cost al-Qaeda less than $1 million. 20 And insurgencies in Afghanistan have demonstrated time and time again that even overwhelming force is no guarantee of winning an escalation.

  The paradox of poorly resourced organisms adapting more quickly than their well-heeled opponents may have a simple solution. It may be simply that the best adaptations don’t require many resources at all. In other words, the stake to get a seat at the escalation table is really cheap, and once you are there, you’re as well-equipped as anyone to have a winning hand. This is especially true for adaptations, like the stinging cells of an anemone, that confer multiple benefits. Humans long ago developed complex cognitive abilities, so putting those into use in conflict is essentially a free form of adaptation. Moreover, we can’t know the price of adaptation beforehand because we don’t know exactly what the problem that needs to be solved is. It may be that an out-of-control truck is hurtling toward your car, in which case having had the resources to be ensconced in a Volvo rather than in a beat-up old Ford Pinto would likely confer a survival benefit. But it may be that your biggest worry is the potential for infection from a cut in your toe, in which case some basic awareness and wound management is all you need. Unfortunately, we often learn only retrospectively that resources were never the best answer to the security challenge that was posed. Welding plates of scrap metal to Humvees by U.S. soldiers was likely a better adaptation than waiting for the Department of Defense to roll out multi-million-dollar MRAP vehicles years later. Even better, and cheaper, was talking to local warlords to establish peaceful relationships and gain tips about bomb makers and bomb deployments.

  Thinking a little more mechanistically, it may be that motivation plays a big role in overcoming a resource disadvantage. Consider a coyote chasing a field mouse. Both animals desperately want to win this interaction, but one of them is just a little more desperate. If the coyote fails, it misses its dinner, but if the mouse fails, it loses its life. This “life–dinner principle,” a term coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins,21 is believed to give an evolutionary advantage to prey species. The more honest nature films these days show the blooper reels where the lioness misses the zebra and tumbles headlong into a mud pit, revealing how often predators actually fail. This same logic applies to many human security escalations. Kenney noted that the narcos (the drug dealers) fall on the “life” side of the equation, because failing to evade law enforcement (the “narcs”) will get them killed or captured, whereas the narcs may just lose a promotion or congressional favoritism if they fail.22 Indeed, Kenney notes that narcs often use failure to justify calls to Congress for more funding, meaning that the relative adaptational motivation to not fail is even greater for the narcos.

  But motivation can’t be enough. After all, some zebras who are presumably very motivated to survive still get killed, and many more insurgents have been killed by the superior firepower of allied forces than have killed their supposedly less motivated enemies. What else keeps an organism or an organization from being overrun by its considerably more resourced competitor? Information provides a pathway for adaptation that can slip its way around even a mountain of resources held by an opponent. I have argued that information from nature is easy to obtain by those willing to act as naturalists and study it carefully, but this doesn’t mean information flows freely in nature. Rather, natural systems have developed diverse pathways for using and sharing information. Secret codes, deception, and double crossing are as common in nature as in human society. The next chapter reveals some of the diverse ways that organisms in nature have come to use information and communication offensively and defensively, and what it could mean for our own adaptation and survival.

  chapter seven

  CALLING YOUR BLUFF AND BLUFFING YOUR CALL

  THROUGH MY NATURAL SECURITY PROJECT, I met Dan B., an expert in surveillance and threat assessment. He is a critically important contributor to the project, but he can be hard to track down sometimes. Sometimes he’ll be deployed in the field for months at a time in a remote outpost in the Rocky Mountains. Then I’ll learn that he’d been roaming about high altitude places in dangerous territories of Pakistan, including the town where Osama bin Laden was discovered to be hiding out. From what he is able to tell me about his work, I’ve learned that he spends his time there stealthily deploying remotely operated drones and running a network of observers who fastidiously watch how individuals in populations respond as these threats enter their community. He wants to know exactly how a population under stress responds to a threat, and how their response changes over time. Do individuals respond in a rational or even pre
dictable way to threats? Do individuals eventually stop caring if something once perceived as a threat never unloads with its full arsenal? He meticulously notes the responses of each individual, categorizing and quantifying their reactions with the detached air of a scientist.

  That’s because Dan is a scientist. Dr. Blumstein is a behavioral ecologist at UCLA, to be more precise. The remote drone he deploys isn’t a spy plane from Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works but a stuffed badger pelt mounted on a customized remote-controlled truck chassis known as Robo Badger. His subjects aren’t Pakistanis caught in the crossfire of the war on terror, but their marmot compatriots. And his networks of observers are students who are learning to study animal behavior.

  Marmots are small alpine mammals that resemble overstuffed squirrels with stubby tails. They live in small groups that forage in alpine meadows, ever watchful for predators. Dan is particularly enthralled by marmots, even hosting a website, “The Marmot Burrow,”1 dedicated to them, which includes, helpfully, that they make decent pets because they can be housebroken, and when you go on vacation they will just hibernate. Dan has spent countless hours quietly observing his subjects, getting to know each individual and discovering that they, like humans, have their own idiosyncrasies and their own tolerance for risk and uncertainty.

  When Dan really wants to pinpoint how the threat of predation affects prey’s behavior, he uses an array of ingenious homemade gadgets and sensors, including the fearsome remotely operated Robo Badger. When he drives Robo Badger into the territory of a peaceable group of small marmots, all hell breaks loose, but Dan is prepared to note how each individual responds. Using this mix of keen observations of nature and clever experiments, Dan has been able to catalog general rules of how threatened populations respond to their adversaries.