By Charles H. Pence
Hello! This is my first post here, so I suppose I should introduce myself. I'm Charles Pence, a philosopher and historian of biology by trade, and a brand new assistant professor at LSU. I also have projects in the digital humanities, as well as the philosophy of technology, particularly the role of emerging technologies in warfare. Hopefully, you'll eventually see posts on all of the above from me here.
For the moment, though, I wanted to think a little more about some remarks that I offered at the 30th Anniversary Conference of the John J. Reilly Center at the University of Notre Dame, my graduate alma mater. I was asked to give comments on a set of reflections offered by George Lucas (the ethicist and philosopher of warfare; no Star Wars content from me yet), covering the history of the last thirty years in weapons technologies. I knew that I wouldn't have anything adversarial as far as comments – George's work is great, and was intended to be an approachable summary. Instead, I wanted to explore a theme that George brought out in his remarks (and which many others have advocated as well). It is a claim often-repeated that the shifts currently occurring in military technology are somehow qualitatively different from prior technologies – a difference not merely in degree, but in kind.
In thinking about this claim, my philosophy-of-biology alarm went off. This sounds not unlike a common way of describing rapid evolutionary changes, like those changes in body plans which took place during the Cambrian Explosion, a rapid period of diversification around 543 million years ago (Mya).
Figure 1: A diversity of Cambrian body plans. Adapted from Fig. 3 of Smith et al. (2013), doi:10.1038/ncomms2391
Check out all those awesome body plans! You have some traditional bilateral symmetry, some slightly-less-traditional five-point symmetry (think starfish), and then crazy nonsense – some spirally-symmetric organisms, and some entirely asymmetric organisms.
This sort of innovation in body plans at the time of the Cambrian Explosion was rampant. Most of them didn't make it, of course – most of the now-extant organisms that live outside the ocean are bilaterally symmetric, and only a few ocean-dwellers are still radially symmetric (jellyfish) or five-point symmetric (starfish). But most of the major animal body plans that we now see appeared in a relatively short period of time.2 The Cambrian Explosion, then, was the very definition of a change in kind rather than a change in degree.
So how did it happen?
Before I turn to that, I should note that the idea of drawing an analogy between evolutionary or biological change and change in science or technology is by no means a new one. David Hull's masterful Science as a Process is the standard source for an analogy between scientific theory change and evolution. While I haven't read it, I'm also told that there's a similar view concerning technology development in Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants. Caveat lector, then, because all of this could have been done before.
Okay, really, so how did it happen?
Here's a going explanation from evolutionary developmental biology. Development of organisms is, as a rule, highly constrained. This is why, even in the face of some pretty large perturbations, offspring tend to resemble their parents. There's simply nothing you can do to a pregnant human to produce a seven-limbed offspring, and a whole host of minor negative influences on development will still result in more-or-less fully functioning humans. Prior to the Cambrian Explosion, then, a variety of developmental constraints were in place. These constraints pushed organisms down developmental pathways designed to build the ancestors of the Cambrian animals, colonial protists.
Figure 2: A colony of choanoflagellates, likely the extant organism most similar to the ancestors of the new body plans produced in the Cambrian Explosion. You may remember them from your high school biology class, wherein you debated whether Volvox was an organism or a Pokémon. From DHZanette on Wikimedia.
In the Cambrian Explosion, then, these constraints were relaxed, allowing for the emergence of multicellular organisms and massive innovation in body plans. (What relaxed them? Active area of research, hard to say for sure. Maybe a rise in atmospheric oxygen levels!) This sudden relaxation of constraints let organisms explore much more of the phenotypic space, leading to the appearance of beasties like those up there in Figure 1.
Now for the payoff. I think this points us toward a really interesting way of approaching technological development, and particularly how we can understand whether or not there's a genuine difference in kind in contemporary weapons development.
What kinds of constraints might we be thinking of here? I can think of several. First, there's monetary constraints, forcing technologies to be built primarily by nation-states with large military-industrial complexes. Second, we have constraints due to the limits of human control. Other plausible constraints to consider include challenges in locating targets, data storage, communication, and more.
More to the point, all of them have been or will be relaxed in contemporary military technology. Weapons development is now within reach of the average citizen, fully autonomous, networked, and equipped with GPS and nigh-infinite data storage. Military weaponry will, quite plausibly, be free to explore a (potentially disturbingly) large region of its "phenotype space."
I wish I had some sort of moral of the story here, where I could close with a clever insight predicting the future of weapons technology, or offer a justification for a regulatory or ethical principle. I can't, thus doing my best to fulfill the blog's slogan. But I do think that this offers us some pretty plausible evidence that we are, indeed looking at a genuine difference in kind in weapons technologies. The most important question to ask next: does this mean that we need a difference in kind in our ethical frameworks, too? Or will traditional tools like Just War Theory and International Humanitarian Law continue to serve our twenty-first century needs?
[1]: I owe this revelation to a great slide by Gen. Robert Latiff, with whom I twice co-taught a course on the Ethics of Emerging Weapons Technologies. He put three columns of technologies up: one Cold-War, one '90s, and one contemporary. Between the first two columns was written "EVOLUTIONARY," and between the second two, "REVOLUTIONARY." So Bob basically did my work for me here.
[2]: Increasingly, evidence is stretching out the boundaries of the Cambrian Explosion. We once thought it was only a few My long, and that number is growing as we find more fossils, particularly in China. For a really nice review article describing the status of the Cambrian biota, watch for a new edited volume that Grant Ramsey and I should have out with University of Chicago Press by the end of the year on Chance in Evolution. It's got a great chapter by the paleobiologist Doug Erwin that covers the latest developments.
