TED: Know Thy Enemy

If you do a Google(r) brand intertube search for "why they hate us," you'll get about 107,000 hits. 9/11 sparked two great arguments around this phrase. The first is an argument about the correct answer to the question, if there is one. The second argument is between those who think it is a topic worth studying and those who think asking is wrong because it somehow acknowledges some amount of our own culpability for the actions of terrorists.

Here are two very unrelated TED talks that illustrate beautifully why the folks who think we shouldn't ask "why they hate us" are so wrong. The first talk offers a new approach for our ongoing struggles against perhaps the most persistent and adaptable enemy our civilization has ever faced: germs. The second demonstrates a practical example of how to benefit from an intimate understanding of a pest (crows).

Paul Ewald: Can We Domesticate Germs?


Consider our approaches for battling infectious diseases in light of evolutionary principles. A lot of what we do pushes the evolution of infectious organisms in ways that ultimately make them more lethal. For example, our heavy reliance upon antibiotics naturally selects for drug resistant bacteria. Paul Ewald asks whether there are things we could do to make these diseases evolve in a way that selects for strains that are progressively less lethal?

He cites two examples:
1. Cholera: Diseases that spread person-to-person have an evolutionary brake on virility because strains that make people so sick they can't leave their homes can't spread to other hosts. However, water-borne illnesses are trickier to contain because even when a person with Cholera becomes bed-ridden and immobile, their waste products usually make their way back to the water supply for transmission to others. Consequently, improved drinking-water treatment systems have two affects on water-borne illnesses. First, they greatly reduce the spread of Cholera in general. Second, they completely eliminate the primary means of transmission for the most deadly strains. Consequently, even if you don't eliminate cholera, you make it manageable. To back this up, he cites a cholera outbreak in South America in the 90's and compared the severity of strains over time in two countries with strikingly different water treatment systems (Ecuador and Chile). In only five years, the severe strains disappeared in Chile but remained in Ecuador.

2. Malaria: Unlike cholera, malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes (or skeeters). Ewald points out that improvements that make housing more mosquito proof have tremendous effects in countering malaria fatalities, but not in the way you might think. Mosquito-proofing ensures that severely sick people can't spread the disease through mosquitoes while they are too weak to leave their beds. You're still just as likely to get malaria when you venture outside, but as time passes you become much less likely of catching a variety of malaria that will put you out of commission because the serious strains have failed to find new hosts. This becomes particularly valuable in places in Africa where no amount of conventional efforts can control the prevalence of mosquitoes and malaria.

Joshua Klein: The Amazing Intelligence of Crows



Crows are smart-damned-birds, and this video is worth watching simply for the examples of how well they are able to use their big bird brains to survive and prosper among humans. Despite their um... charm, lots of folks consider them pests. However, Joshua Klein accepts the challenge of harnessing their intellect toward constructive ends. His solution: crow vending machines.

Klein walks you through his process for training crows to deposit coins into a specially made machine in exchange for peanuts. The crows in his neighborhood now sweep the city for discarded change and return it to his back yard. Unfortunately, he doesn't report a return on investment.

Lesson:
By examining what makes bacteria and crows tick, have we somehow ceded the moral high ground? Of course not - the question is amoral. We're looking into the dynamics of a system to find efficient means to exploit it. (In the case of the crows, the exploit just happens to be a mutually beneficial exchange.) Terror networks are organisms. They have their own dynamics, and they evolve. It is madness to fight them without understanding them. Consequently, societies that tolerate this sort of willful blindness toward the motives of their enemies are ensuring their own demise.