Interview: Using nature to tackle terrorism

Protection from terrorism is an unusual subject for a marine biologist to get involved with, but Raphael Sagarin has a special reason. He believes living things can show us how to keep society safe. He explains to John Whitfield why one look at natural systems will tell us that the war on terror is doomed to fail

John Whitfield
1319 words
9 February 2008
New Scientist
(c) 2008, New Scientist, Reed Business Information UK, a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Protection from security breaches is an unusual subject for a marine biologist to get involved with, but Raphael Sagarin has good reason: he believes living things can show us how to keep society safe. Many biological systems have evolved effective defense systems that Sagarin says can teach us a thing or two about managing threats. He explains his thinking to John Whitfield , and why he believes trying to eradicate terrorism is a waste of time

What made you start thinking that biology can help tackle terrorism?
It came from being out of my element. I am a tide-pool biologist, but I have always been interested in politics. In 2002 I went to Washington DC for a year to be a science adviser to a US congresswoman. I saw an ecology of fear: any loud noise in the congressional office building and people would be under their desks. Cement barriers popped up around everything you could drive a car near. I started to think about the fiddler crabs I used to watch in Cape Cod when I was a kid. The males grow an enormous claw, which they wave at each other in ritual battles, and eventually one stands down. Cold-war security was a fiddler-crab escalation of armaments, which works very well if your adversary is similar to you. But the west's adversary today is completely different, more akin to a virus. I started to get in touch with people who knew more about both security systems and biological systems.

How did biologists and security people react?
Almost every biologist was initially strongly sceptical. Yet even those who hung up on me called back and said they'd been thinking about security in relation to what they work on, be it viruses, marmots or networks of schoolchildren's relationships. Nearly every security person jumped on the idea.

So what lessons about security can we learn from the natural world?
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 or 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. They have agents out there sensing and responding to the environment. You can see this through many levels of biological organisation, in the immune system, for example, or in colonial organisms such as ants and corals.

How does that compare with current systems of human security?
It is in stark contrast to the most visible US response to the attacks of 9/11, which was to create this enormous Department of Homeland Security . You can see the results: individual organisations do not get enough autonomy and cannot make decisions in a timely manner. They cannot respond and adapt without having to go up through many layers of command. It's more to do with keeping power and maintaining committee memberships, jobs and budgets than security.

Can you give me an example?
A good one is airport security. One of our working-group members, Dan Blumstein at the University of California, Los Angeles, looks at how marmots respond to predators. He has noticed there are marmots he calls "nervous nellies" that signal all the time. Rather than ignore them, the others spend more time on the nervous nellies' signals because they're trying to find out if they are honest or not. We humans do a lot of nervous-nelly signalling. Go to any airport in the US and you'll see that the security threat level is orange, and it has been that way for as long as I can remember. We're constantly on alert, and constantly saying we're on alert, and it doesn't do anything for people except make them spend a lot of time trying to find out if it's a real or false signal. Banning liquids on planes, for example, has been an unbelievable waste of resources, in terms of time and money, not to mention the number of my kids' yoghurts that I have had to throw out. It merely shows an adversary how to adapt their system.

On the other hand, there hasn't been a terrorist attack on US soil for more than six years.
It is hard to evaluate negative data. There is not a lot about our security systems that makes me think we're invulnerable. For example, many liquids can be dehydrated and then rehydrated with anything you can get on a plane. There have also been major breaches since 9/11, and we're not just talking about national security. Take hurricane Katrina: we were unprepared and responded in a completely inadequate way. Organisms deal with all sorts of security threats, from the environment, other species, their own species, their own bodies. We too should be thinking about security under a broad framework.

Are there any successful examples of the kind of security approach you are advocating?
The one I often cite is of DARPA , an arm of the US Department of Defense that develops forward-thinking technologies. It had a grand challenge: to create autonomous robotic vehicles. Rather than contract this out to a single organisation, it went out to university groups and offered a million-dollar prize. DARPA had remarkable success, as all these individual groups tried to solve the problem.

What would you do if you were president?
I would break up the Department of Homeland Security and have different autonomous agencies work on different security problems.

Can the war on terror be won?
It is politically expedient to say we are going to eliminate risk, so we have a "war on drugs", or terrorism. But organisms inherently understand that there is risk in life. The idea that we can eliminate these risks would be selected against quickly in the natural world since any organism that tried to do so would not have enough resources left for reproduction, or feeding itself.

Are there ethical implications for the "natural" approach to security?
The worry is if you get dogmatic and say we must apply what we learn in nature directly to our affairs. For example, the immune system maintains security by sending out agents to find out everything. That speaks to the idea of total information awareness, which is abhorrent to those believing in civil liberties.
Some colleagues in biology said they didn't want to get involved in my project because they thought it would lead to developing weapons systems. But such systems will be developed in any case, and I would rather see them developed efficiently than stick with wasteful systems that have got people killed unnecessarily. My approach is to step into the debate and hope that our analyses result in better outcomes, because I think we can do it better.

By John Whitfield

Raphael Sagarin studies the impact of climate change and human activity on marine life at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He also runs a working group studying ecological and evolutionary models for homeland security strategy at the US National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. He is co-editor of Natural Security: A Darwinian approach to a dangerous world, published this month by University of California Press.