Learning From the Octopus

by Rafe Sagarin

  For example, in keeping with our understanding that variation is the fundamental building block of nature, Dan finds that not all marmots are equally well-adapted for survival. In particular, Dan has seen that some individual marmots, who he calls “Nervous Nellies,” cry out often to the group that a predator is near and often make false alarms, while others (“Cool Hand Lukes”) only make a signal when there is a clear and present danger. Unlike the parable of the boy who cried wolf, however, other marmots do not come to ignore the calls of Nervous Nellies—if they did, they would get eaten during the rare times when the Nellies (which, like the Lukes, can be either gender) are honestly signaling a predator. Rather, they are forced to spend extra time and energy (which means less time eating and reproducing) trying to figure out if the call is meaningful. By contrast, the Cool Hand Lukes, who always produce honest signals, make life easier for all the marmots. Those around Cool Hand Luke don’t waste time on false alarms and are certain when he or she makes a call that they need to get to safety immediately.

  The marmots tell us three important things about information and security. First, information use and sharing can be as essential to survival as any other adaptation. Second, both a key goal and a resultant outcome of using information in survival situations is to create or reduce uncertainty. Third, the way receivers of information—both your friends and enemies—perceive the signals you are sending is vitally important to your survival.

  This chapter is about how the use and abuse of information can lead to vastly different outcomes for security. I will explore the mechanisms nature uses for information sharing and how human security systems often operate in a completely contrary way to nature.

  Living organisms can keep up with evolutionary arms races even when they are vastly out-resourced, if they know how to use information correctly. Clearly, al-Qaeda has continued to operate despite overwhelming resources deployed against it by sharing information and motivating supporters on the Internet.2 Michael Kenney notes that drug traffickers have a natural advantage over law enforcement in that they know exactly how they will carry out their own illegal activities whereas law enforcement usually has at best only small amounts of this information.3 On the flip side, this informational advantage can be lost quickly, and that stealthy adaptational pathway may be lost in an avalanche of resources from the other side. As Kenney notes, “Traffickers’ and terrorists’ primary advantage in competitive adaptation is informational: when they lose their covert edge because law enforcers have identified and located them, they face great difficulty overcoming the force advantage of the states.”4

  But using information covertly is only one way that information influences adaptation in escalatory conflicts. Public information also plays a huge role in how organizations both with and without resources adapt to security challenges. Scott Atran, who has interviewed hundreds of radical terrorists, argues that “publicity is the oxygen of terrorism.” He cites Saudi Arabian general Khaled Alhumaidan, who deftly highlights the difference between the clash of physical resources and the power of informational resources when he remarks, “The front is in our neighborhoods but the battle is the silver screen. If it doesn’t make it to the 6 o’clock news, then Al Qaeda is not interested.”5

  Public information drives acts that compromise security as well as our responses to those acts. In the same way that new selective forces (such as an ice age) have radically reshaped evolution and escalation throughout Earth’s history, public information widely broadcast has become a new selective force in our security battles. This has both positive and negative impacts for how we adapt. The July 2010 leak of 75,000 documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan on the website WikiLeaks revealed, in part, that many apparent successes in winning over local leaders in Afghanistan were short-lived, at best. These releases of information could be seen, alternatively, as an essential selective force for ensuring that our adaptations aren’t wasting resources or missing threats to our security, or, in the perspective of a U.S. congressman who called for the execution of the suspect who leaked the documents to WikiLeaks,6 a source of treason.

  In other words, information and communication can be both an adaptational advantage and a trap. Information is cheap, but it’s not free. Just the act of using information makes one vulnerable. Crafty cuttlefish have adapted around this problem by learning to communicate with one another in secret messages coded in polarized light, which their predators can’t detect.7 This allows a single cuttlefish in a group to warn the others without attracting the predator’s attention to itself. But a large military operation inevitably leaks information that is much more difficult to conceal. Insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan learned quickly to identify the signs of a changeover in troop deployments, and it is suspected that they step up their attacks just after the new troops arrive.8 The controversial WikiLeaks episode was made possible by the increased exchange of information between intelligence agencies and the military called for after 9/11. Both al-Qaeda and regular armies, as well as narcos and narcs, reveal potential points of attack when they share information by cell phones or on the Internet. 9 A single errant phone call by Osama bin Laden’s most trusted messenger was enough to help U.S. intelligence forces track down his location. Repeat offender criminals leak information each time they commit a crime related to their behavior, their methods, and the locations of their crimes. If they are not careful to continually vary how they act, they may be susceptible to new analysis methods that link crimes by the same person via the signals they send while committing each crime.10

  Focusing on information sharing may be the most effective way to neutralize a threat. For example, scientists have recently discovered a radically different picture of the bacteria that cause diseases like cystic fibrosis. Once thought of as lone operators who cause damage when combined with many other renegades, these microbes are now known to work in coordinated fashion and use advanced communication strategies, including coordinating among themselves and intercepting signals sent by the host body’s immune system. Whereas simply attacking these bacteria with antibiotics might lead to selection for antibiotic-resistant strains, targeting their communication system by blocking the molecules that send signals between bacteria, or those that detect signals from their hosts, is a promising new approach to treating microbial diseases.11

  USING UNCERTAINTY TO YOUR ADVANTAGE

  Not surprisingly, there are myriad ways natural systems share information, but in that reassuring way that natural systems build complexity and diversity out of simple building blocks, the wide array of natural information use coalesces around a single overarching theme: organisms seek to reduce uncertainty for themselves and increase uncertainty for their adversaries.

  The need to create uncertainty for an adversary and reduce uncertainty for oneself and one’s allies explains many complex behaviors in nature. Birds flock to cause uncertainty for a predator about any individual’s vulnerability, while predators use camouflage to create uncertainty about when and from where their attack will come. This simple rule also explains the phenomena that occurred during the year I lived in Washington, D.C. That summer, sidewalks crackled underfoot like a fall day, the sky was filled with a high-pitched wail, and backyard barbecues suffered a most unusual precipitation. The singular culprit of this strangeness was the periodical cicada, a large winged insect that had emerged by the trillions after seventeen years underground. The cicadas leave their underground dens for a brief period to mate and deposit eggs in tree branches, which will hatch into larvae that drop to the ground and bury themselves for another seventeen years. Although local predators certainly feasted on this unusual treat, the cicadas’ numbers literally overwhelmed the birds and squirrels, and a large number of the insects completed this vital part of their life cycle without being eaten, thus raining dead bodies onto barbecues and littering the sidewalks with their dry husks. Had the cicadas emerged in a regular period like every summer, predators could accommodate their own life cycles to match t
his emergence and maximize their populations to feast on the hapless insects. But these seventeen-year periodical cicadas, like their thirteen- and seven-year periodical cousins, had evolved to exploit the mathematical uncertainty of prime numbers to avoid emerging during banner years for predators.12

  By contrast, most of the security screening we conduct tragically reverses the uncertainty rule of nature—that is, it makes life less uncertain for our adversaries and more uncertain for ourselves. When we widely advertise what we are looking for and how we are looking for it in security screening (which we must do when we order everyone passing through security to be screened in an identical fashion), our adversaries greatly reduce their uncertainty—they now know exactly what is being looked for and they can then work on adapting ways to get around the screening.

  At the same time, we increase our own uncertainty by constantly crying “predator!” (or, as the case may be, “terrorist!”), which continually erodes our confidence that anyone really knows what is going on. Over the decade that the TSA used its color-coded Homeland Security Threat Level Advisory System—that five-color warning scheme prominently displayed in airports and other public facilities—it rarely changed the warning level. In airports, the threat level stayed constantly at orange from August 200613 until the program’s demise five years later. This was not a convincing show to our enemies that we actually did know what they were up to, and it also didn’t give clear information to the population it was supposed to protect. On a typical “orange day,” video screens under the threat-level announcement told us that we should “Report Suspicious Activities to Authorities.” This didn’t seem like information particularly targeted to a highly elevated threat level—after all, shouldn’t we always report suspicious activities to authorities?

  Like the Nervous Nellie marmots, these kind of ambiguous warning systems don’t work because they create uncertainty among the population they are supposed to protect. And uncertainty, in turn, creates stress. Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford University who is recognized as one of the world’s experts on stress, began to recognize this during his first studies of baboons. He found that individuals who were low on the social ladder experienced much more uncertainty about when or by whom they would get attacked, and had much higher levels of stress and associated maladies.14 Stress affects people in uncertain environments in similar ways. In fact, a recent medical report demonstrated that more people have died of heart failure due to increased terrorism-related stress since 9/11 than died on 9/11 itself.15 Not all of this additional mortality is due to ambiguous signaling, of course, but uncertainty is a major component of the additional stress these people reported.

  HONEST AND DISHONEST SIGNALS

  One of the key ways of managing uncertainty is through signaling. All sorts of animals, as well as many plants, use some form of signaling to help themselves and their fellow individuals survive in a risk-filled environment. Signals are certainly shared between animals of the same species. They might be warnings about a nearby predator or boasts about one’s sexual fitness or subtle clues about one’s perceived spot in a dominance hierarchy. But there is also a lot of signaling between species. Often, interspecies signaling takes the form of prey species giving warning signals to their predators. Why would a prey species make itself known to a predator by signaling its whereabouts? Mostly to ruin the element of surprise. Predators and prey are locked into an intense and highly evolved game. But as I mentioned in the previous chapter, most predation events result in failure. Chasing down a fleet animal, swooping down on a tiny animal from high above, and striking fast enough to immobilize a prey of equal size are hard to do under the best circumstances. When a predator that relies on surprise is discovered by the prey, it will usually call off the hunt before it’s begun.

  Signals do not even have to be perfect to work. Many benign animals mimic the coloration of a similar toxic animal to trick predators into avoiding them. Biology textbooks tend to show side-by-side pictures of the most perfect mimics, but in reality there are many mimics that aren’t nearly so perfect. For these animals, it is just enough to confuse a predator long enough to get a head-start escaping.16 Sometimes, in fact, mimicry that is too perfect can cause trouble. It was recently found that two tropical butterfly species, which are near-perfect visual mimics of one another (an adaptation to deter predators, as their coloration signals that they are poisonous), end up confusing males, who spend considerable time determining if the female they are courting is really of their species.17 Cuttlefish, intelligent cousins to the octopus, are masters of camouflage, but not necessarily because they are perfect at it. For example, when they are hiding in sea-grass beds, they don’t try to match the patterns of grass using their color-changing skin; rather, they raise their arms, swaying them in synchrony with the ocean currents. If they had tried to perfectly match the sea grass, even small differences would leave the animal exposed—but by adding more stripes (their arms) to the striped environment of the sea-grass bed, they create a disruptive pattern in which it is difficult for a predator to be sure what is an edible creature and what is inedible background.18 This imperfect but advanced form of camouflage has drawn the attention of military analysts who recognize that dynamic, changing patterns are far more effective than the static camouflage currently employed by the military.

  Humans have occasionally employed imperfect signaling in successful improvements to their security. When desperately short of resources in the face of the German blitzkrieg, Britain created inflatable dummy tanks and airplanes that both diverted German bombs to harmless targets and, while not perfect, distracted the enemy enough to boost wartime production of real tanks and airplanes.

  Imperfect signals serve a purpose in some cases, but Britain wouldn’t have held off the blitz with inflatable weapons alone. Dishonest signals are quickly exposed when they come into contact with the signal receiver. Consider the Argentine jail that placed a mannequin of a security guard made out of a soccer ball and a guard’s cap in one of its watchtowers to save money under a tight budget. Two prisoners promptly escaped once they figured out the ruse.19

  Organisms in communities need the Cool Hand Lukes—the truly useful signals—accurate, directed, and clear. Dan Blumstein has compiled a number of examples of “honest” signals from nature. Male red deer, for example, roar to impress females and express their dominance to other males. It has to be an honest signal because the depth of the roar is controlled by the size of the deer’s body, which in turn is a fairly reliable indicator to the deer’s potential mate and potential competitors of his fitness, or his capacity to grow large. Male peacocks also make demonstrably honest signals to females. The more energy they are able to put into their display, the more opulent and bright their feathers become. A malnourished peacock, which would make a less fit mate, cannot put much energy into making a flashy signal.

  Marmots also tell us that to be effective, signals better be perceived properly by their intended targets. If Dan used Robo Badger in a truly deadly fashion against the marmots, even Cool Hand Luke’s best alarm calls directed at the erstwhile badger would be useless because the remote-control car powering the badger pelt does not hear. From lowly invertebrates to otherwise unremarkable mammals like ground squirrels, we are beginning to discover that animals do indeed target their signals very accurately toward their receivers. Cuttlefish make very different signals when faced with different predators. If the nearby predator is a fish, which tend to assess a potential prey item quickly and then move on, the cuttlefish puffs itself up as big as possible and uses its color cells to form two “eye spots” on its back—an effective bluff that is also utilized in a more permanent fashion by less-flexible creatures such as the four-eye butterfly fish. But when the cuttlefish is facing off against crabs, which hunt by smell, or dogfish, which use electric fields to hunt, such visual displays won’t work, so the cuttlefish just jets away as quickly as possible.20 Ground squirrels were recently discovered to also possess a fin
e-scale sense of how predators received their signals. Squirrels will make shrill alarm calls aimed at bird and mammal predators (who can hear), but when faced with a snake (which doesn’t hear), they don’t call but rather puff up and shake their tails. If that snake happens to be a rattlesnake rather than a gopher snake, the squirrel also heats up its tail because rattlesnakes are unique in that they perceive infrared radiation.21

  We have not always abided this lesson in our security efforts. For example, shortly after Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. Special Forces, the United States released captured videos of bin Laden’s life in hiding. The Western press took the signal exactly as the government intended, discussing the videos of the bedraggled bin Laden bobbing his head like a mentally deranged man on the floor of a sparsely furnished room under headlines like “Videos Demystify the Osama bin Laden Legend.”22 Yet the video signals were received in a completely different way by the radical Muslim world. They saw images of a very rich man nonetheless living with few possessions. They saw that he kept his long beard despite the need to disguise himself, and that he wrapped himself in a dark blanket and prayed on the floor, bobbing his head in a ritualistic way to what was likely a reading of the Koran (sound was edited out of the released video), all signals of a devout Muslim following in the way of the Prophet.23 What was meant to show an image of a weakened al-Qaeda leadership actually signaled the complete opposite to potential followers.

  Those plucky Brits in World War II do provide effective examples of signaling directed precisely to the receiver to improve security. R.V. Jones recalls in his autobiographical account of the efforts of Britain’s Scientific Intelligence Service24 that in order to disable German radar, Jones and his ragtag team of scientists needed to figure out how it received signals. Once they were able to do this, they developed simple devices like strips of reflective fabric cut to just the right length that could be dropped from aircraft so that German radar would see not a squadron of bombers, but a harmless cloud.