Adapt or die: staying secure in a post-Sept. 11 world

THE 9/11 Commission Report declared that the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil represented a "failure of imagination" on the part of national security. The true threat to American security, however, is not a failure of imagination but a "failure of adaptation."

Our planet is undergoing rapid political and socioeconomic changes, to which our security measures must adapt.

Fortunately, we're surrounded by millions of examples of security measures from nature that do just that. Biological organisms have adapted to persistent and unpredictable threats in a hostile world for at least 3.5 billion years. With a little imagination, we can use their adaptations to guide our own.

Adaptation, going back to the first amphibians leaving the sea, is fundamentally about leaving your comfort zone. This is a lesson we have egregiously ignored. Our adaptations to changing security risks since 9/11 have mostly been to deploy more guns, more guards and higher gates, all under the direction of the top-down, centralized bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security.

In nature, however, adaptable systems generally eschew central control in favor of semiautonomous, distributed authority in which individual units can sense and immediately respond to changes in the environment.

Our immune system, which has evolved in a way that allows it to quickly identify and neutralize invasions from pathogens, is an example of this. So, too, is the semiautonomous human organization known as Google, which has prospered by encouraging its individual workers to independently develop new ideas that can be quickly passed on for further adaptation to billions of independent testers on the Internet.

Contrast these successes to the failure of a top-down centralized bureaucracy such as FEMA, which responded glacially to Hurricane Katrina, and you begin to see the benefit of semiautonomous organization.

Nature also teaches us that adaptation to environmental risk carries no goal of perfection. Well-adapted organisms don't try to eliminate risk. Avoiding every predator in the reef or jungle would expend their resources. Instead, they learn to live with risk, by identifying and responding to only those predators that pose the most serious threats to their survival and reproduction.

In human society, it's politically expedient to propose security initiatives that promise total risk elimination, such as "winning the global war on terror." Though we may be buoyed by such declarations, they are misleading. Terrorism cannot be eradicated. It is a globally distributed risk with deep evolutionary roots that are fed by a complex web of social, political and economic factors. Trying to eliminate such a threat is like trying to eliminate predation.

A wiser course would be to marshal our energies toward strategies that apply the lessons of natural adaptation constructively. An analysis of the deep evolutionary roots of behavior suggests we will be frustrated in most attempts to change the fundamental beliefs of our enemies. Fish don't try to turn sharks into vegetarians. Instead, they respond to the risk of predation by avoiding it, changing themselves or even embracing it through symbiotic partnerships.

In our increasingly interconnected world, we can't avoid our enemies, and there will be constraints on how much we can, or want, to change our own way of life. We can, however, form symbiotic relationships over issues of fundamental human survival that transcend ideology.

Such relationships already are evolving in regions where the word "cooperation" is seldom uttered, and they are following a natural model.

Networks of health officials and practitioners working to curb infectious diseases are forging new bonds between Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and between former foes living along the Mekong River in Southeast Asia.

Network practitioners were quietly allowed into Myanmar to do their work days, not weeks, after the catastrophic cyclone there. These networks have emerged from the ground up as local, adaptive responses to the need to protect human health and food supplies from threats that know no borders.

The early success of these networks gives us hope that we can apply lessons from natural adaptation to our own security. Security lessons from nature are not classified, but freely available to those willing to step outside their comfort zone and take a look deep into the heart of the forest or the eyes of a hungry predator.