Learning From the Octopus

by Rafe Sagarin

  In order to do so, we need to recognize that even deep-seated adaptations are constantly under evolutionary pressure. Evolution doesn’t just produce one-time solutions that either survive or fail. Those that survive do so both because they were good solutions and because, through modification, they adapt to new situations. So, it is not enough to track down the evolutionary roots of a behavior; we also need to see how that behavior has adapted in the modern world.16

  Detailed ethnographies of some people who subscribe to some of the most violent belief systems are illuminating how belief systems manifest in the modern world, and are supplying viable pathways toward diffusing the most dangerous aspects of these beliefs. When biologists study nature we typically ask questions and channel our voice through nature to answer those questions for ourselves. Fortunately, with humans, no such ventriloquism is needed. We can ask humans about their beliefs and get an answer directly from them. True, humans are clever enough to obfuscate in their answers, replying in half-truths and ambiguous language. But in reality, we can account for these human biases in the same way we account for biases in nature—we don’t only “ask” one starfish what color it is and then declare that all starfish are that color. Likewise, by being conscious of human biases and designing questions and experiments carefully and, most of all, applying these treatments to many, many people of different backgrounds, one can start to get a sense of general patterns in human beliefs.

  Scott Atran, an anthropologist who studies people who hold certain beliefs with such tenacity that outside observers would likely call them irrational—young men who vow to commit acts of suicide terrorism, radical right-wing Israeli settlers, and militant Hamas members—calls these apparently intractable beliefs “sacred values.” Examples of sacred values include Palestinians’ belief in a right of return and Israeli settlers’ belief that they were chosen by God to live on the land. Through thousands of interviews with Israelis and Palestinians and their leaders, Atran has begun to identify and characterize sacred values, and even develop strategies for resolving conflicts built around them.17

  One of Atran’s earliest conclusions was that sacred values are not fungible. Sacred values have been shown to hold up to all sorts of proffered alternative ideas. They resist compromise, they resist financial incentives to change, and they even hold up when clearly preferential economic and material alternatives are offered in exchange for letting go of those values. In fact, using hypothetical case experiments, Atran and his colleagues found that offering subjects large sums of money or other goods in exchange for compromising their beliefs would increase the subjects’ willingness to commit violent acts in the name of their cause.18

  So, how do we get anywhere given this mess? At first glance, all this deep evolutionary thought just seems to reinforce our knee-jerk reactions about Middle Eastern conflicts: “Those people will never get along” and “They thrive on conflict.” When faced with barriers in nature, organisms either go around them or develop adaptations to live with them, sometimes even changing the nature of the barrier itself in the process. For example, in the tide pools where I work, starfish crawl over rock walls on thousands of hydrostatically controlled tube feet, but their closely related cousins, the sea urchins, actually dig depressions into the same rock walls (resembling the work of an ice cream scoop), transforming them into apartment complexes sheltering hundreds of their fellow urchins. Likewise, when faced with sacred values conflicts, two strategies emerge: we can go around them, or we can transform them.

  The idea of going around them requires some counter-intuitive thinking on the part of people who have been banging their heads against the wall of sacred values conflicts for decades. What Atran found in his experiments was that again and again, regardless of age or status, subjects on both sides of a dispute involving sacred values were willing to open their minds to dispute resolution in exchange for materially valueless but symbolically rich concessions from the other side. These “symbolic tradeoffs” often involved nothing more complex than a sincere apology for past wrongs, or a mere acknowledgement that the other group has a right to exist.

  When explaining the concept of symbolic tradeoffs, Atran uses an example from a sideshow to U.S. diplomatic efforts of the early 1970s to restore normal relations with China.19 The deployment of “ping-pong diplomacy” involved sending U.S. ping-pong players to China to compete in highly publicized (within China) matches. Inevitably, the Chinese slaughtered the hapless Americans, scoring a huge symbolic victory for the Chinese while costing the United States almost nothing, because nobody really cared about ping-pong in the United States. That we were willing to concede defeat graciously gave China an alternative view to that of the United States as an unremitting superpower, and helped open the door to ultimately successful diplomacy.

  Nelson Mandela also utilized symbolic tradeoffs in shepherding a peaceful transition from apartheid, when he became president of South Africa. In this case—recounted in the 2009 film Invictus—black South Africans now in a ruling position moved quickly to change the name and colors of the Springbok rugby team, which had been dominated by white Afrikaners and thus was a symbol of the apartheid regime. Mandela not only overruled this decision—seeing it as a petty form of revenge—but moved to elevate the status of the team and the sport as a symbolic gesture to white South Africans that their traditional customs would be respected and welcomed as part of a new multiethnic country.

  Symbolic tradeoffs are a key—perhaps essential—step in opening the door to negotiation when sacred values collide, but they are unlikely to solve a conflict in its entirety. This is why it is essential to understand that sacred values are themselves not immune to evolutionary pressure. I am not suggesting that the values themselves are handed down genetically, and scientists have not discovered a “sacred values” gene, but analogously to most biological organisms, they are simultaneously extremely well-defined by set characteristics and yet malleable under the right circumstances.

  In biology, this apparent contradiction makes sense. An octopus can instantly change its color and skin texture, even its overall shape, to match its environment, yet through all its transformations it remains biologically an octopus. Likewise, it is nearly impossible to eliminate the sacred values held by an individual or group. When they come under threat, they become hardened and more sharply defined. This has clearly occurred with the rise and fall and rise again of right-wing armed militias in the United States. Their high points in terms of membership and high-profile activities coincide with the early years of the Clinton and Obama presidential administrations, both of which were feared to have a strong gun-control agenda.20 When they are accepted and even left alone, they begin to soften and become more malleable. There is also the possibility of substituting one set of group beliefs for another, provided the right type of “addiction module” is offered, and provided that the timing is right.

  Although my focus has been on the negative aspects of belief systems and group membership, they clearly offer benefits to individuals. Like the early bacteria gaining protection with its self–nonself addiction module, belief systems in humans gain us entry into a group that then protects us from others who are not in the group and are potentially dangerous. It is the beneficial aspect of group belief systems that creates an opening by which dangerous beliefs can be substituted with more benign beliefs. A notable example is the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), which is one of the most successful addiction treatment programs ever created. Although even adherents don’t really know how it works,21 it is interesting that AA has many of the same characteristics of group belief systems. Participants are asked to take AA’s tenets on faith (“let go and let God”) and are asked to make costly signals of their loyalty to the group—for example, confessing all of their transgressions to people they’ve wronged while under the influence—but they also are surrounded by more experienced recovering addicts who protect them from the influences of outside addicts. Here, one more benign addict
ion module is substituting for a more dangerous form of addiction.

  What is the right time to substitute sacred values, or belief systems? In nature the right time can be either when the organism itself is ready for a change or when a change in the environment around the organism makes such change worthwhile. For some hard-shelled organisms like lobsters or crabs, even a minor change, like growth, can only occur when they molt their shells—a period of high vulnerability. Other shelled organisms, such as snails, will radically change their protective layers by growing thicker or growing defensive spikes when they detect the chemical presence of predators in the environment.

  For the alcoholic, the timing of the trade between addiction and recovery is almost invariably at a point called “hitting bottom.” This could occur when the alcoholic is seventeen or fifty-seven, so it is not so much time-dependent but based on the environment the alcoholic finds himself in. For religious convictions, however, the timing is typically more constrained, specifically to the period around adolescence. Richard Sosis and Candace Alcorta, anthropologists who work at the intersection of biology, culture, and society, have devoted considerable effort to uncovering universal traits of religion, in particular the transmission of religious ideas. They have identified adolescence as a nearly universal period of development when religious ideas and values are imprinted.22 Moreover, they have shown that there are biological and social aspects of this pivotal period that feed back on themselves and intensify the vulnerability of adolescents. From a basic biological standpoint, the adolescent brain is going through unprecedented changes in growth, structure, and pattern formation—the whole architecture of cognition is changing. From an individual social development perspective, adolescence is a time of risk taking, although how this is related to the physical changes in the brain is not well known. And from a global anthropological standpoint, it is notable that secular and religious rites of passage—which require substantial material sacrifice in exchange for largely symbolic rewards—tend to be concentrated around adolescence. These factors amplify one another, making adolescence both a period with a high natural likelihood of acquiring radical convictions and a period that is actively used by recruiters to indoctrinate group beliefs and values. It is not a coincidence, then, that adolescence is also a prime period for development of drug addiction. The same factors and adolescent dispositions that open an adolescent to addictive states, however, can be exploited to shift a person in this stage away from destructive belief systems. This is why David Dobbs, in reviewing the evolutionary science of the teenage brain, urged us to shift our preconceptions about adolescence, noting, “In scientific terms, teenagers can be a pain in the ass. But they are quite possibly the most fully, crucially adaptive human beings around.”23

  Adolescence is the period where alternative activities may actually have a chance of becoming substitutes for a group identity that compromises security. Here again, an intimate knowledge of the environment and society in which these adolescents live is illuminating. Scott Atran and his colleagues have found that many individual jihadists were recruited as adolescents through local soccer clubs. Sitting as a witness in congressional hearings alongside hardened experts on fighting terrorism, Atran’s solutions sound almost quaint. He suggests starting soccer clubs with a secular or at least less radical religious underpinning as a way to provide the same social bonds—even tap into the same ancient need for group identity—but with less extreme side effects.24 The idea seems logical enough, but developing such alternative pathways to group identity is not free from controversy. A $30 billion crime bill proposed by President Bill Clinton and debated in Congress in 1994 was nearly scuttled in the last minutes by controversy over a relatively minor “midnight basketball” provision, a program designed to offer safe, gang-free spaces for adolescents to play sports at night.25 Its cost was $50 million, a fraction of one percent of the total expenditure of the crime bill. Atran and colleagues also suggest that new pathways that tap into the “purpose-seeking, risk-taking, adventurous spirit of youth for heroic action”—exactly what adolescents think they are getting when they sign up to attack Western superpowers—must be found and introduced on a peer-to-peer basis, rather than from elders admonishing youth to forge more moderate pathways.26

  Taken alone, these singular opportunities to alter the course of belief systems appear too rare, and the changes they instill too inconsequential, to alter the enormous evolutionary inertia behind them. It is important to recognize that in most cases, even with very destructive belief systems, a radical change is not needed to be able to live with the risk of any given group. Rather, the change only needs to be just enough so that different individuals or groups can peacefully coexist. Fortunately, such delicate coexistence is as old as the diversity of life on Earth. In fact, a convergence of ideas from early natural history, modern genetics, new views on free market economics, and biological anthropology all point in the same direction—that conflict and cooperation are intimately linked, even dependent upon one another. And in a hopeful sign for security, the history of life seems to show that cooperation serves as the more dominant force. In biology, we call the resultant admixture symbiosis, and the remarkable forms it takes in nature and in society are the subjects of the next chapter.

  chapter nine

  HANG TOGETHER OR HANG SEPARATELY

  THERE WERE MANY REASONS that IED attacks in Iraq dropped off suddenly in May 2007. Troops got better at detecting and destroying IEDs before they caused damage. The U.S. government spent billions of dollars on JIEDDO, the Joint IED Defeat Organization, which developed numerous technological solutions, such as jamming devices to disable wireless IEDs. And very late in the game, at the tail end of the decline in IED deaths in Iraq, IED-RESISTANT MRAP vehicles began to lumber onto the streets of Iraq.

  But the most important component of reducing IED mortalities in Iraq was symbiosis—a working relationship between organisms. Symbiosis between electronic warfare officers from the air force, army soldiers, and marines needed to be forged to develop effective wireless jamming devices. Before that point, electronic warfare experts developed great jamming devices, but when they put them into combat, soldiers and marines discovered that they interfered with their own communication devices, so they shut them off.1 But as I’ve argued throughout this book, a technological solution—a thicker shell, a stronger claw, a higher wall, a better jamming device—is rarely a lasting solution. Escalation ensures that a motivated enemy will adapt. JIEDDO officer Noel Lipana acknowledged as much to me, noting that wherever they implemented wireless jamming, the enemy went back to the old wired devices and pressure-plate explosives, and when soldiers went back to cutting wires, the enemy switched to wireless devices. The more important symbioses then were the relationships formed with local leaders, even those that may have once been leading attacks on American soldiers. Like many biological symbioses, these relationships emerged between parties that would seem to have no reason to cooperate. Americans provided technical expertise and resources for civil works projects, and local leaders provided key information on networks of IED makers and their plans. Like many biological symbioses, these relationships were also transformative. When local people saw their leaders working with the Americans, they too began to share information—the peak in tips about IED activity given to soldiers by civilians marked the beginning of a rapid decline in successful IED attacks in Iraq.

  So far, I have discussed a number of natural security strategies. In order to survive and change, an organism needs to learn within its own lifetime and across generations. It needs a decentralized organizational system. It needs redundant features. It needs to keep running just to keep up. It needs to reduce uncertainty for itself and create uncertainty for its adversaries. If that organism is a human, it needs to understand human behavior. But an organism or an organization could do all of these things and still easily fail the survival game. That’s because of this simple rule of nature: no organism does it alone.

  Eve
ry organism on Earth is actually a collection of different organisms, bound together by a wide diversity of symbiotic relationships. Symbiosis arises in nature for a simple reason. All organisms are constrained in their adaptability at some point, and symbiotic relationships allow them to extend their inherent adaptive capacity to exploit new resources and environments or adapt to their own environment as it changes.

  In the biology textbooks, symbiosis falls into three classic divisions. There are mutualistic symbioses—relationships in which both parties benefit. There are commensalisms in which one party benefits but the other party isn’t affected much at all either way. And there are parasitic symbiotic relationships in which one party gains and the other suffers. In reality, symbiotic relationships smear across these categories and change with time. Former parasites, like certain viruses that invaded the human genome long ago, have evolved to become harmless or even beneficial. Some mutualistic relationships evolve and turn parasitic, such as once-cooperative relationships between pollinating wasps and flowers that turned parasitic when wasps evolved to lay eggs within the flower (that will hatch into larvae that eat the flower’s nectar) without providing the benefit of pollination.2

  Regardless of the type of symbiosis, three things are certain. First, symbiotic relationships are ubiquitous in nature—you can’t go anywhere, look at any biological community, or dissect any biological organism without finding symbiosis. New symbioses are turning up all the time. It’s long been known that algae lives symbiotically in salamander eggs, providing nutrients and an oxygen boost to the developing embryo. But recently algae were found to provide the same function within the embryonic cells, the first time this has been seen in a vertebrate and something that was thought to be impossible because the vertebrate immune system typically eliminates invaders into embryonic cells. Whole new pathways for symbiosis are being discovered as well. Lars Peter Nielsen has coined the term electric symbiosis to describe recently discovered relationships between bacteria deep in ocean sediments and those at the surface of the sediments. The deep bacteria break down hydrogen sulfide to produce energy, but it was thought that they need oxygen from the surface to carry away the electrons resulting from their energy-producing reaction. Apparently, though, nano-scale protein wires form a conductive network between the surface and deep bacteria, and these wires do the job of carrying the electrons to the surface, where abundant oxygen finishes the reaction. 3 In this case, not only are two organisms symbiotic, but they have created a whole physical network to support their symbiosis.