Learning from the Octopus; How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease

New York: Basic Books, 2012. First Edition. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/very good. Rafe Sagarin. xxv, [1], 284, [10] pages. Rafe Sagarin was a marine ecologist at the University of Arizona who argued that human security systems could be more effective if they took their cue from how organisms deal with threats in the natural world. The idea occurred in 2002 when he was working as a science adviser on Capitol Hill, during a period of heightened security following the 9/11 bombings. He recalled, "I'd watch these other Capitol Hill staffers, and I noticed that they just put their hand over their keys in their pockets so they didn't have to waste 30 seconds putting it on the conveyer belt. . And it just made me think adaptable organisms, if you're talking about an adaptable terrorist, are going to figure out a way to get around this." In a later book, Learning From the Octopus: How Secrets From Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease, Sagarin argued that the security issues faced by human societies are analogous to those faced by many organisms in the natural world, where risks are frequent, variable and uncertain. Yet, while animals respond to such threats by reducing uncertainty for themselves and increasing it for their adversaries, human security authorities tend to do the opposite, reducing the uncertainty of society's enemies by telling them exactly what they are searching for. From the author's description: THE MAIN PREMISE of the book is that natural organisms have learned to thrive in an unpredictable and risk filled planet without having the power to plan, predict, or try to perfect themselves. By contrast, we waste endless resources on strategic planning, predictive models, and optimization, with few successes to show for it. Natural organisms have successfully avoided all this waste by being adaptable.

ADAPTABILITY has become a popular corporate buzzword, but few people actually know what it means to be adaptable, or how to do it. This book breaks adaptability down into its component parts and then shows how they can be inserted into any area of society where risk is present and unpredictable.

LEARNING FROM THE OCTOPUS is the result of a long journey, from the tidepools of Monterey Bay, where I conducted marine biology research, to the halls of Congress, where I served as a science advisor to Congresswoman Hilda Solis after 9/11. It was there that I witnessed first hand how poorly adapted and wasteful our massive new "intelligently designed" security architecture was. For the past several years, I have facilitated a series of discussions based on the simple question, "what can we learn from nature about how to keep ourselves more secure?" Participants have included evolutionary biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, soldiers and marines, police and fire chiefs, TSA agents, air marshals, public health practitioners, business leaders and cyber security experts. The lessons in "Learning from the Octopus" are told through the stories of these people-all keen observers of nature and security-as well as through the natural organisms-from viruses to octopuses-that are all wonderful examples of how to learn from success and adapt to an ever-changing planet.