Introduction to a special issue on biologically inspired analysis of social systems: a security informatics perspective

Abstract

Many national security challenges have at their core the problem of understanding and predicting the behavior of social systems, for instance in order to discover groups of individuals of interest, characterize their current activities and motivations, and anticipate the way they are likely to behave in the future. However, despite the allocation of vast resources to the task of analyzing and forecasting social behavior, the utility of such analysis remains limited. Biologically inspired (BI) approaches to analyzing complex systems appear to offer significant potential for this problem domain. For example, rapid progress is being made in the application of BI algorithms to challenging questions in the fields of financial market analysis, cyber security, and large-scale optimization. The current special issue brings together experts from a variety of fields to try and build on the potential of gaining traction on complex security problems by drawing on BI approaches. The genesis of the special issue was a series of workshops sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security on this theme. The special issue brings together an extraordinarily diverse group of researchers from fields across the social and hard science in areas such as biology, computer science, ecology, economics, engineering, psychology, and security studies. As one might expect the papers in this issue often take very different approaches to examining the issue of how BI approaches can help us in analyzing complex systems to understand why and how individuals might behave in certain ways within the context of a social system and specifically within a security perspective. The papers examine issues as diverse as information analysis for intelligence purposes, how to respond to, or predict the growing threat of cyber warfare how to understand the lethality of different terrorist organization and how leaders can help individuals in their organization deal more effectively with the increased stress that a more diffuse and dangerous security environment has engendered. The authors use a wide array of approaches from computational experiments, to agent based modeling and ethnographic studies. Despite the diversity we believe that the papers hold together very well as a broader and multi-disciplinary effort to increase our understanding of how Biologically inspired can better help us understand the changing security environment the United States currently faces. Rafe Sagarin and Terence Taylor provide a broad theoretical overview to how our understanding of biological evolutionary systems and the frameworks that have been developed to think about them can be applied to the security challenges that societies face. Saragin and Taylor are particularly interested in how our understanding of natural adaptability can be applied to the social problems of security. They provide a very useful discussion of adaptability that clarifies why the theoretical meaning of adaptability which is often used in security contexts is unclear and counterproductive. By clarifying the concept of adaptability and drawing directly from existing biological knowledge about the concept Sagarin and Taylor are able to outline four useful lessons which so far have not been applied in a security context but which they make a compelling argument would be much to our advantage if they were. Also drawing on a broad BI inspired perspective, Paul Ormerod’s paper leverages evolutionary theory to create an agent based modeling (ABM) approach to help better understand the distribution of fatalities in terrorist attacks. Basing his analysis on data of such attacks Ormerod focuses on dealing with the problem that such attacks are, like many human phenomena, heavily right skewed. From a cultural evolutionary theory perspective Ormerod argues that “copying” is a better explanation of human behavior as it relates to the lethal question at