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It’s nature’s way In a recent interview (“When nature is one step ahead”, New Scientist, 2008 02 09) marine biologist Raphael Sagarin has little to say about security that a libertarian could disagree with:
You can look at virtually any question about security through a biological lens, from how to develop weapons systems to how to organise government departments. You look at what the most successful organisms do to solve their security problems, and then you try to use that. One clear lesson is that the species of systems that have been around the longest, adapted to many different environments and captured the most resources have a structure of fairly limited central control, with a lot of autonomy.
He believes DHS should be broken up into a number of smaller organizations; that TSA carries out actions which are an incredible waste of resources and that some of the best work the government does is through small organizations like DARPA.
It is a very interesting read if you can find it.
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Hmmm. very interesting article but perhaps the lessons to be learnt from nature are not quite as clear as the article portrays.
Animals, all organisms, learn by dying. The environment changes and those organisms that are not equipped for the new environment die.
So the lesson from the Marmot example is “Listen to the ‘nervous nellies'”. Those groups of Marmots which didn’t listen to the ‘nervous nellies’ – false alarms and all – are gone. Their predators found easy pickings and could feed more young who likewise waxed fat and prospered, and the smell of easy lunch attracted other predators.
But then there was a bit of a drought which produced a shortage of fruit and leaves, (or insects or whatever marmots eat), and those groups that listened to the nellies were constantly wasting good eating time by running around looking for predators that weren’t there, and were reduced to tired and hungry animals that were easy meat for the predators that were there.
So what’s the lesson?
Then there is the Katrina example. The lesson I would draw from nature is that there should be no Federal help for New Orleans. When organisms that can’t survive crisis, or adapt to change, fail then nature doesn’t offer a helping hand. It generally offers a swift kick in the nuts.
He also talks about the immune system. When our bodies detect an intruder they react by producing antibodies to wipe it out. And we keep on producing antibodies until every last threat, or anything that looks like a threat, is wiped out, often harming the host body in the process.
So what should our response to 9/11 have been in that case?
There may be some useful lessons to learn from Dr Sagarin, but the main lesson from nature, for societies as well as individuals, is adapt or die.
You can draw whatever lessons from nature you want. Look at ants. Look at army ants. Marvellously successful creatures, hmm?
Looking for moral lessons from nature is misleading, looking for design ideas is often helpful.
The marmots need to keep a balance between excessive jitteriness and complacency. The evolutionary solution seems to be to have population distributions of nervousness and tendency to follow fleeing marmots; evolution optimizes the mean and variance of these distributions (likely with a pinch of kin selection). In a variable environment groups of marmots with the right distributions will do better than groups with too narrow ones. Diversity provides extra robustness.
Army ants (and most eusocial insects) are marvels of individualism. Ants do not take or give orders, they just react to the situation and collectively generated scents according to their behavioural programs. Their “motivations” may be rather selfish (or rather, “family uber alles”), but they show how powerful emergent orders can be. No need for a queen to declare that the hive should march east – the decision is made through competition between the scent trails laid by scouts.
The human trick is of course to “let our thoughts die in our stead” as Popper said. We can run simplified evolutionary processes in our heads – and we can be as Lamarkian as we want.