Not long after 9/11, marine biologist Raphael Sagarin found himself working in DC, where there was clearly more security, but never varied security.
This led him to write Adapt or Die for Foreign Policy, subtitled, What Charles Darwin can teach Tom Ridge about homeland security:
The Cold War was a symmetric conflict in which the two rivals had enough weaponry to guarantee that a “hot” war would result in mutual destruction. Superpower tensions played out in what biologists call dominance displays. In evolutionary terms, the annual May Day parade of missiles in Moscow’s Red Square and former U.S. President Richard Nixon’s “madman” strategy — when he put the United States on secret nuclear alert in 1969 to rattle the Soviets — were no different than the ritualistic claw waving between competing male fiddler crabs.
Terrorist networks such as al Qaeda represent a decidedly asymmetric threat. Like a virus, al Qaeda is an infectious organism, capable of lying dormant for long periods of time. It then hijacks the critical machinery of its victims to weaken their evolutionary fitness. And just as the treatment for viruses is more complex than the remedy for blunt trauma, combating al Qaeda requires a more subtle approach than the chest puffing generally used to meet a symmetric challenge.
Sagarin recommends a number of lessons from Geerat Vermeij’s Evolution and Escalation: An Ecological History of Life — which nominally discusses snail and crab evolution:
- Form good relationships.
- Never stop adapting.
- Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
- Be redundant.
- Be flexible.
(I guess lesson 4 means I shouldn’t quip that lessons 2 & 5 and 3 & 4 seem repetitive.)
Sagarin and his colleagues went on to write a book, Natural Security, and a Nature paper, on the same topic, which PhysOrg.com reviews:
“Terrorists figure out unexpected means of attack, hackers come up with new software to break through firewalls, and pathogens develop resistance to antibiotics.”
[...]
“About 1,500 soldiers had died from roadside bomb blasts between the time troops identified the threat and the time MRAPs (mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles) were deployed to deal with the situation.”
Even after the blast-resistant vehicles arrived, they proved only moderately effective against a quickly moving threat that is constantly changing and rapidly adapting to new challenges.
“These MRAPs are huge, lumbering things that weigh 16 tons,” Sagarin said, “The insurgents, on the other hand, drive around in small pickup trucks. They quickly figured out the MRAPs were limited to certain roads and started placing roadside bombs specifically along those routes.”
Animals’ alarm calls are more sophisticated than you might realize:
Hunting prey uses a lot of energy, Sagarin explained, which is why predators seek to ambush their prey. As soon as the prey is aware of their presence and ready to engage in defense, a pursuit might no longer be worth it.
Ground squirrels, for example, use alarm signals when a predator is lurking nearby, not only to warn their peers, but also to make it known to the attacker its cover is blown.
“When a prey species makes an alarm call of any kind, the game is up,” Sagarin said. Suddenly, things have become a lot harder – if you’re a hawk, you want to swoop down on a squirrel and not get scratched in the face.”
Remarkably, ground squirrels use alarm signals that are very specific to the threat. If the predator is a mammal (which can hear), they utter alarm calls. If it is a snake (which cannot) they use tail-flagging to signal its presence.
The less specific an alarm call is, the less efficient it is in eliciting an appropriate response, the authors argue and point to the U.S. Homeland Security’s threat advisory for national and international flights, which has remained at level orange (high) since August 2006. This static, ambiguous and nonspecific system creates uncertainty or indifference among the population that it is meant to help protect.
That conclusion misses the point. Yes, the blanket orange alert creates indifference among the population, but the point of the analogy is that a blanket alert doesn’t say to the terrorists, “Don’t even try it!”
Of course, it’s not clear that we should follow the squirrels’ strategy against snakes, because we can kill any “snakes” we spot.
