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

by Rafe Sagarin

Despite the billions of dollars we've poured into foreign wars, homeland security, and disaster response, we are fundamentally no better prepared for the next terrorist attack or unprecedented flood than we were in 2001. Our response to catastrophe remains add another step to airport security, another meter to the levee wall. This approach has proved totally reacting to past threats and trying to predict future risks will only waste resources in our increasingly unpredictable world.In Learning from the Octopus, ecologist and security expert Rafe Sagarin rethinks the seemingly intractable problem of security by drawing inspiration from a surprising nature. Biological organisms have been living -- and thriving -- on a risk-filled planet for billions of years. Remarkably, they have done it without planning, predicting, or trying to perfect their responses to complex threats. Rather, they simply adapt to solve the challenges they continually face.Military leaders, public health officials, and business professionals would all like to be more adaptable, but few have figured out how. Sagarinargues that we can learn from observing how nature is organized, how organisms learn, how they create partnerships, and how life continually diversifies on this unpredictable planet.As soon as we dip our toes into a cold Pacific tidepool and watch what we thought was a rock turn into an octopus, jetting away in a cloud of ink, we can begin to see the how human adaptability can mimic natural adaptation. The same mechanisms that enabled the octopus's escape also allow our immune system to ward off new infectious diseases, helped soldiers in Iraq to recognize the threat of IEDs, and aided Google in developing faster ways to detect flu outbreaks. While we will never be able to predict the next earthquake, terrorist attack, or market fluctuation, nature can guide us in developing security systems that are not purely reactive but proactive, holistic, and adaptable. From the tidepools of Monterey to the mountains of Kazakhstan, Sagarin takes us on an eye-opening tour of the security challenges we face, and shows us how we might learn to respond more effectively to the unknown threats lurking in our future.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Nature, Biology, Animals, Self Help, Psychology

322 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 27, 2012

Reviews

[Matt Cannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I saw this on a curated reading list from Shane Parish of Farnam Street and he described it “You know that feeling you get when you read something that’s so amazing you’re not sure you want to share it with people because it’s your own little secret?” How could I not check that out? See his list here - https://fs.blog/reading-2019/ This book is like a sleeper that no one knows about. Written in 2012, and it wasn’t available on Audible, or my local library. I ordered it from Amazon and bought the hardcover which is really nice in my opinion. I agree with Shane’s assessment, this book has many counter intuitive truths in it that are hard to disagree with. Being that I work in cyber security professionally, I gained many nuggets of wisdom that I can apply directly in my daily life, but this book can be used in virtually any field. My main takeaways, study nature and biological systems to adapt your problem solving approach. Whether it’s the jumping spider who turns out to be an effective hacker of the ants firewalls. The spider breaks into the ant nest by mimicking the unique olfactory signature of the ant colony - essentially stealing their password. Then in a second act of deception, the spider gently taps ants carrying larvae, just as other ants do with their antennas. This prompts the ant to drop the larvae and earns the spider a meal. The book also gets into the development process of the Stanley, a modified VW SUV filled with jury-rigged cameras, motion sensors, radars that can safely navigate through complex environments it’s never seen before without human intervention vs the Osprey which cost 93.4 million each, part helicopter, part airplane, trying to make the perfect aircraft following the failed rescue of American hostages in Iran. The Osprey ended up being ineffective and created a whole bureaucracy around the production of them. One option costed taxpayers billions of dollars and hasn’t done what it aimed to do. The other was less expensive, organic and has saved countless lives. The author doesn’t try to compare the vehicles against each other as much as he studies the process in how they were created. It has lots of eye opening details that can be applied to many areas of business! This is a great book. It’s not for everyone, but if you read it you’ll learn some good information that will set you apart from most traditional thinkers.

[Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title and cover art is an egregious marketing attempt to draw octopus lovers or those with national security concerns to read this book. That's a fairly wide audience and perhaps it worked. As an octopus lover, I grabbed it. If you are like me beware, there is less than one page dedicated to our darling cephalopod. Guessing at his motivation for writing this book, perhaps Sagarin wanted to impress us with the biological fact that we are simply animals and by understanding this we may stop destroying the planet so quickly. It is a fast-moving compendium of ways animals of all kinds protect themselves with some interesting notes on Iraq and other national security issues. More interesting to me, he connects modern human behaviors to earlier stages of our evolution all the way back to virus implanting bacteria with the distinction of us vs them! Really? The book deserves several more rewrites and an editor as it leaps around and misses connections for nonscientists like myself. Reads like a transcript of audio notes made at 4AM. All that said, I enjoyed it immensely and heartily recommend this eye-opening read to students of human and animal behavior even if you are not interested in larger national security issues. His ultimate point is, as was Pogo's, as a nation we are worrying about the wrong threats and doing some darn foolish stuff.

[SeaShore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published 2012, the author was born in 1971 and died by bicycle accident in 2015.
This was a long read but happy I completed it after a few months. A remarkable person for ideas that might have helped our world, super intelligent, in my opinion.
There are many Youtube videos on his work. I kept wondering what ideas he would have proposed during the Covid pandemic and currently with advances in technology especially AI.

Some people have said that we overestimate the octopus and this had me thinking about it's Biology.

One of the points in this book that interested me was water. He detailed the history of the Zanja system 1791 -1904 and of course, various water systems are being studied.
Recently, I came across an article published by Cambridge University Press, "Water sector infrastructure systems resilience: A social–ecological–technical system-of-systems and whole-life approach."
The persons responsible for the article (paper) says,
"Our water systems are threatened by aging infrastructure, floods, drought, storms, earthquakes, sea level rise, population growth, cyber-security breaches, and pollution, often in combination. Marginalized communities inevitably feel the worst impacts, and our response continues to be hampered by fragmented and antiquated governance and management practices. This paper focuses on the resilience of water sector (drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater [DWS]) to three major hazards (Sea-Level Rise, Earthquake, and Cyberattack). The purpose of this paper is to provide information useful for creating and maintaining resilient water system services.
"
Sagarin suggested ideas (back in 2015), such as natural adaptability and he said that challenges should be issued rather than telling people to do things, and that symbiotic relationships happen with plants, all animals including humans. Humans understanding our place in the environment, on the Earth as part of the Cosmos have come a long way in understanding this relationship and I hope we continue to explore and learn.

it's a 5-star for his eloquence and ideas.

[Philip Veilleux · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sagarin tisse des liens forts intéressants entre les mécanismes de protections de la flore et de la faune dans leur évolution et ce que les humains ne font pas pour se protéger tant physiquement qu'en cybersécurité. Il souligne plusieurs aspects et techniques utilisées dans la nature que nous devrions nous aussi adapter à notre technologie pour l'améliorer et nous protéger davantage...

[Noah Sochaczevski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could have been a blog post. But still has a very interesting premise about how we, humans, should try to solve our biggest problems with a fundamentally different approach. Instead of trying to prevent inescapable problems, we should become flexible enough to defend ourselves when the problem inevitable comes.

[Agatha Glowacki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and creative and enjoyable.

[Drew Holler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but too meandering to be great.

[Marshall Hunt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not many actual solutions

[Michael Jr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learning from the Octopus:
How secrets from nature can help us fight terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and disease
By: Rafe Sagarin

Overall: 4 out of 5 Stars

First and foremost, this book should be required reading and studying for every single military and law enforcement member in the U.S. and our allies, we do not want our adversaries adapting these lessons.

In Learning from the Octopus, Rafe Sagarin makes some extremely compelling arguments for the lessons found all over nature that can enhance public safety in a multitude of fashions. I make this evaluation from a point of experience, as I have been a police supervisor in Baltimore, and a Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. From the inappropriate allocation of resources of the TSA to the mismanagement that is rooted in law enforcement, Rafe Sagarin finds examples of successful implementation of more efficient and better management that has already been proven to work, in nature.

I don't think that the subject matter of better management is anything revolutionary, scholars and successful businesses have been showing law enforcement the better ways to manage for a long time now. What Rafe Sagarin does that is special is bring it down to simple examples that can be understood by all education and experience levels. From the patrol officer just out of the academy to the federal czars, there are simple lessons that can make citizens safer and utilize their money more efficiently.

Creativity: 5 stars
I have spent a great deal of effort in my personal writings to try and find a way to break through the wall of comfort that is found in law enforcement. I sincerely hope that this new angle of speaking to those working to protect us can help open their eyes to the mismanagement that is everywhere. Law Enforcement especially is extremely afraid of change, which is why they keep doing the same things over and over, with the same pathetic results. Rafe Sagarin does an excellent job of presenting a creative new way to encourage a change for the better.

Spelling and Grammar: 3 stars
Rafe Sagarin is not an author, he is a marine ecologist, so given that, he did a very good job at presenting his case. I did not discover any obvious errors, but the writing is educational in nature and thus, does not flow like a book. There are sections that repeat and sections that can speak over the head of the target audience, but he does the best that he can.

Execution: 4 stars
Overall, I am in awe of the work that Rafe Sagarin has put together her. This execution gets knocked down to four stars because of the occasional speaking over our heads and the biggest flaw in the whole book, a glaring hypocrisy. Granted Rafe Sagarin is a marine ecologist, has a love and respect for the environment, and by nature of his profession has been force feed liberal agendas, but if he is going to speak to us in public safety about thinking on a new level and appreciating history, he must do the same, else his lessons fall on deaf ears.

Rafe Sagarin makes some humerous and intelligent insights into how religious beliefs are a key factor in many of the poor decisions that humans make or beliefs that they hold dear, even when all evidence points to the contrary. While I agree with him, I cannot overlook that his religion of global warming has blocked some of his own thinking.

Here is an example on pages that sit next to each other:

Page 150: "And we ignore over 100 years of collected scientific wisdom while we watch human-induced climate change alter our entire planet."
Page 151: "If we convert our years as humans on Earth to words in a book, analyzing security only in the context of the past few thousand years of human history is like trying to understand all of War and Peace by reading only the last word."

Page 151 is where Rafe Sagarin speaks to us, page 150 is where I can't help but dismiss him. Mr. Sagarin, if the past thousand years of human history is the last word of War and Peace, then looking at the last 100 years of weather patterns is like reading the last word in the entire library of congress.

Michael A. Wood Jr. “The Critical Critic”

http://www.michaelawoodjr.com

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rafe Sagarin, a marine ecologist, suggests that we can use the lessons of nature to help prepare for natural disasters as well as to manage conflict among groups. Millions of species on Earth have learned how to survive and thrive in a risky, variable, and uncertain world – why not learn from natural organisms how they do it?

Through numerous very entertaining examples of behavior of biological organisms, the author finds that the most important property of surviving in response to selective pressures is adaptability. As he points out, “Fish don’t try to turn sharks into vegetarians.” Instead, they learn how to live with the risk and survive in spite of it. He describes, for example, how limpets withstand the pressures of waves, how starfish manage to feed on mussels, why beetles are so successful and how octopi avoid predators.

He also gives many examples of failures in human societies that could have been avoided by using the main lessons from organism survival that enhance adaptability: decentralization (maximizing benefits of on-site ability to react to changes in the environment); the use of redundancy; learning from success instead of just learning from failure (which is, at best, a solution to a one-time problem that has already occurred); and the use of symbiosis – i.e., working together so that each party benefits. Working together can also result in large networks of independent, redundant parts, or it can result in emergent organizations that take on new properties from the combination of its constituents.

One barrier to using the nature model to increase societal adaptability is the top-down organization of many institutions in our society. Small elites get insulated and ossified, and resist sharing power. When change does take place it is often too late. On the other hand, allowing small networks within organizations to have the freedom and resources to innovate in response to problems that arise, and/or soliciting help for identified problems by issuing challenges, would emulate the natural adaptive organization of nature. This is already happening, he asserts, on an informal basis. Organizations that act more like networks, with units capable of reacting semi-autonomously to threats, can respond faster and more effectively. Compare, he proposes, the human immune system, and how well it works.

The lessons of nature, Sagarin notes, are “free for the taking”: "It’s time to feel the cactus spine, listen to the marmot’s shrill call, and stare deep into the eye of an octopus.”

Evaluation: While there are those who resist attempts by academicians to reach beyond the narrow confines of their disciplines, I for one applaud their eclecticism, and think there is much to be learned from the practice. But even aside from Sagarin’s arguments for recognition of the value of biological understanding for human organizations, the stories he tells about organisms, particularly those found in tide-pools, are fascinating and worthwhile on their own. It also turns out that many of Sagarin’s ideas about connecting nature and society were inspired by Ed Ricketts, the very same “Doc” from John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. I found out interesting facts in every chapter. I really enjoyed reading this book! My one complaint is that the index is not very helpful.

[Marvin Goodman · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're reading reviews of this book, I suspect that you'll want to know, "did Sagarin actually pull off his mission to illustrate how we might apply lessons from natural systems to improve the way we fight terrorism and other scourges of modern life? And, did he do so in a way that was approachable, compelling, and perhaps even a little bit inspiring?"
Yes...yes he DID, and that makes this a marvelous piece of work. Lest you think that the author spends all of his time comparing octopi to the Taliban, and creating endless metaphors out of suction arms and ink, the octopus in the title is merely a symbol for creatures that adapt to the changing conditions of their lives, both evolutionarily, and behaviorally within a single lifespan.
I expect that you'll find yourself nodding at the parallels and metaphors that Sagarin uses, and thinking (as I did) "Hey! That's exactly what I was thinking!" For Sagarin, despite his obvious intellect and knowledge, has written this at a level that even an Average Joe like me can easily understand, and keep up with his logical flow. If he asked, I would drop everything and go work for Sagarin in any capacity, knowing that I'd be in a workplace where creative thinking is encouraged, where tired and outdated approaches to problems are discarded in favor of new ideas and strategies. Where lessons from outside of the box are studied and considered, and logic isn't treated as heresy.

[Sheehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating application of evolutionary biology to security issues in the world.

The author points out that instead of trying to "solve" security problems (e.g. end terrorism, build the highest tech defense, etc.) we may be much better served emulating nature and having many diverse, adaptable, and "just good enough" solutions which may dissipate the effects of security threats without wasting resources trying to achieve the impossible total eradication of threats. As the author points out, Darwinian evolution as a philosophy has been bastardized a bit over time to reflect the survival of the fittest when in fact nature is the ongoing adaptable survival of the just a bit better. In fact, having deep recursive structures where systems react at every node from micro to macro in just defensive enough postures, is a more efficient use of resources and works to better mitigate disasters when they arise.

This book is super dope, I really enjoyed it as a layman science reader...I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how we move forward in the hyper-leveraged and complex future we are presently navigating.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The octopus is my favorite animal for its uniqueness as an invertebrate. It is the only invertebrate that plays and uses tools, and is widely regarded as the most intelligent invertebrate known to the marine biology community.

Based on the title, my expectation was that this book would capitalize on the unique characteristics of my favorite animal, analyzing and applying them to another of my favorite topics--national security policy.

However, the title is a misnomer. Rather than concentrating on the octopus, the author pulls from a variety of sources in nature to discuss the importance of adaptability in thinking about security issues. While still a fascinating analysis, the title and contents of this book are not as highly matched as I hoped they would be.

[Skip · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great introduction, by narrative, to the application of system dynamics and complex networks to technological and natural disasters for the layperson. I enjoyed the examples, despite the repetition, however if you want a detailed handling of he mechanisms inherent in network adapation and resiliency, I would recommend choosing another book. I hope there is a detailed follow-up that includes mathematical and additional socio-ecological support.

[Erin Keller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, I'm obsessed with cephalopods, so I naturally bought this book - which isn't really about the octopus at all. It's a thought provoking exploration of things we could learn from nature that may help us solve some of our modern/high tech problems. I don't agree with all of the authors summations, but it makes you think which is a big part of what a book should do.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite being overly saturated with detail, Sagarin's arguments intricately illustrate his ideas regarding bio-mimicry. I had a desire to read this solely based on my great love for the octopus. In the end, I walked away with so much more.

[Karen Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

eye opening to a whole new way of looking for solutions...you know, the ones that really work and probably break all preconceptions of how a solution should be developed and thought through. I see ways to applies well beyond security and disease and I plan to start smallwith my work unit.

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned quite a bit from this book but it gets 3 stars because I felt like it wasn't organized very well. It was a bit repetitive at times, too.

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard about this book on NPR. His writing style was slightly irritating, but it's an interesting topic. I only read about half of it, though. I got a little bored with it.

[Sara Bishop]

We could learn SO much, if we could only step outside our ONE viewpoint.

[Gina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great ideas--we need more multidisciplinary creative thinkers like him!

[Sarawati89 · Rating 5 out of 5]

biomimicry put to good work

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very cool ideas. Now I just have to apply them somehow.

[Linda]

This is a really interesting take on learning from nature. I love the connections! Plus it totally proves that octopi rule!

[Tippy]

Didn't finish this one. Although I thought the book would be using the principles of biomimicry, it does not. At best, it uses components of nature as an analogy for potential solutions. In his discussions, he jumps between biological adaptations and the ability of an individual to adapt in a given circumstance in ways that aren't consistent. It seems like an unorganized mess of a book, with an occasional hard-hitting paragraph.