Week 2: Initial Reaction

When I chose this book for the assignment, I was expecting to read a dialogue between social and hard science scientists with some commentary from a mediator. I think I was also expecting it to be written in a "Case Study" style with a detailed recounting of an event followed by the evolutionary explanations for the behavior of the actors. I have read up to chapter 4 and I am not feeling as excited as I had hoped.

The first three chapters are highly descriptive, rather than prescriptive and it is so because the authors are trying to lay the ground work to prepare the reader for the more critical essays that will follow. Having said this, the authors do point out the weaknesses in the current societal, political, and security structures and use behavioral patterns in non-human organisms and ecosystems that lead to success or failure  as analogies to explain why our society may be bound to doom in the face of unpredictable change. 

Their main critiques are that human society -more importantly, the US government, was stuck to a security surveillance and assessment routine that left them vulnerable to undetected threats or unpredictable changes in behavior or environment. Another re-emerging point throughout the chapters is the centralization of power. The authors affirm that successful organisms and ecosystems are organized in a system of semi-autonomous units that do not depend on a centrally powerful unit to make decisions for them. All of the semi-autonomous units share a basic amount of knowledge about the environment they live in but each unit also has specialized intelligence that allows them to react rapidly to a threat or disaster without wasting time in consulting an entity of higher command. Inside these semi-autonomous units there is a leader of sorts, but this leader has very little authority over others since knowledge and capacity to take action is decentralized within the unit. In the third chapter Vermeij explains that the only way that a top-down control system will work is if every decision and command given by the commander in chief was the absolute right one. For a top-down system to succeed there is no room for mutations or drift since every choice is a reaction to a predicted and analyzed threat, regardless of whether said threat is rare and dangerous, rare and relatively harmless, common and dangerous, or common and relatively harmless. 

Another excellent point made is that the state of security is relative. A species can be secure if there is no threat or if threats have been neutralized. But adaptation in response to threats will only be useful as long as the threats are common. If a threat does not occur more than once in a life time, it is hard to believe that a society will evolve to adapt and secure itself from this threat. Also, the authors require successful entities to have a high understanding of their surroundings so as to be able to predict all potential threats. To become this fit, the entity must have unlimited resources. If there are not enough resources, then an entity must lie passive to avoid catching the attention of its predators. This last tactic is successful in terms of increasing organisms' life span but it restricts the amount of mobility and interaction the organisms can have within their environment. Is this cost worth the benefit? That depends on how resourceful you are. 

I find these comparisons and analyses extremely interesting and stimulating, but the solutions proposed seem to me as highly impractical and not applicable to a range of nations that either have the resources and are not are not allowed to stay dormant by other countries or don't have the resources and depend on others for survival. Maybe later chapters of this book will be more prescriptive and will attempt to apply the solutions suggested in the earlier to chapters to current political and social dynamics in a fashion and find that the solutions need to be modified or more specialized. 

Rend, Antonio, and Austin, what do you guys think of the proposed "truths", critiques, and solutions about the organization of current governments and security systems? Considering how technological developments have enabled almost immediate communication of threats, disasters, and diseases and how structured organizations such as the WHO, UN, EU, CDC, FDA, and DHHS react, do you think that the solutions proposed are generally applicable and effective? Don't you think modification is necessary?