McNair Paper Number 52, Chapter 8, October 1996

8.

EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY AS A SOURCE OF FRICTION AND EXEMPLAR FOR THEORY

The previous chapter utilized evolutionary biology to open the door to the possibility that the spatial-temporal inaccessibility of certain information argues that human beings and their institutions can neither eliminate all uncertainty about the higher level effects of future combat interactions, nor substantially reduce the magnitude of such uncertainties beyond the limits set by dispersed information and tacit knowledge. This chapter has two aims: first, to consider evolutionary biology as a source of general friction in its own right; and, second, to explore whether evolutionary biology may offer a better model for a "scientific" theory of war than quantitative sciences like physics.

On the current reading of fragmentary evidence from diverse fields, the human family, genus Homo, emerged some 2-3 million years ago in Africa, east of the Rift Valley in response, initially, to geographic isolation and, spurred by subsequent climatic pressures, evolved rapidly toward modern man, Homo sapiens.(Note 1) Since the mid-1980s, when consensus finally emerged concerning the evidence of the molecular and fossil records, the last great step in human evolution from "archaic" Homo sapiens to "early modern" man is estimated to have occurred between 45,000 and 90,000 years ago. (Note 2)

These observations presume that Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was onto something important when he published The Origins of the Species in 1859. Darwin's core evolutionary thesis was that the rich diversity of living species making up the Earth's biosphere had come about "chiefly through the natural selection of numerous successive, slight, favorable variations; aided in an important manner by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts; and in an unimportant manner, that is in relation to adaptive structures, whether past or present, by the direct action of external conditions, and by variations which seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously." (Note 3)

Darwin's core idea will not be defended here beyond two observations. First, The Origins of the Species contained large gaps "that have only recently begun to be properly filled in," the most fundamental being the absence of the concept of the gene as a discrete unit of particulate inheritance. (Note 4) Though the basic idea had appeared in an obscure Austrian journal by the monk Gregor Mendel in 1865, Darwin himself never hit upon the concept of a gene or any adequate theory of inheritance. This most serious gap in Darwin's original theory was not filled in until the early 1930s when the statistician and biologist R. A. Fisher and his colleagues worked out modern population genetics. (Note 5) There were, of course, other weaknesses in Darwin's formulation of descent by natural selection. While most of these remaining weaknesses were overcom during the 1940s through the work of Theodosius Dobzhansky, Julian Huxley, Ernst Mayr, and others, it has "aken another half-century to iron out most of the wrinkles" in the fabric of the modern synthesis, neo-Darwinism. (Note 6)

Second, notwithstanding much sentiment and strong opinion to the contrary, neo-Darwinism is about as secure as any scientific theory ever has been or could be. True, vigorous controversies remain in evolutionary theory, not the least of which is how self-replicating molecules could have initially emerged. Nonetheless, these controversies are matters of "just science," meaning that no matter how they turn out they "will not undo the basic Darwinian idea." (Note 7) As the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould observed in 1994: "Natural selection is an immensely powerful yet beautifully simple theory that has held up remarkably well, under intense and unrelenting scrutiny and testing, for 135 years." (Note 8) An indication of just how secure core Darwinism (the minimal theory that biological evolution is guided in adaptively nonrandom directions by the nonrandom survival of random hereditary changes) is can be gleaned from Richard Dawkins' 1991 argument that it is the only known empirical theory capable, even in principle, "of solving that most difficult of problems posed by life anywhere in the universe, namely, the problem of the existence of adaptive complexity." (Note 9)

Given this understanding of evolutionary theory, how might it support general friction's relatively undiminished persistence in future war? Consider the various lists of friction's sources in chapter 4, both Clausewitz's and the author's more inclusive list of eight. Occupying the first two places in all of them are danger and war's demands for physical exertion. These are straightforward and remarkably uncontroversial sources of friction, especially at the tactical level of individual combatants and small units. Nevertheless, there is evidence that their combined effects on human beings in ground combat establish a temporal limit on how long continuous operations can be sustained without risking precipitous declines in effectiveness. Further, because this limit-about four days-has not changed for at least the last 130 years, it appears to be rooted in human cognitive and physical limits built in by evolution.

The most recent evidence bearing on these claims surfaced during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Particularly during the final fifteen hours of the Coalition's ground offensive, incidents occurred that in the view of Richard Swain, the U.S. Third Army historian, "were indicative of the larger problem of friction in war." (Note 10) These events included VII Corps' failure to capture the road junction near Safwan in accordance with General Schwarzkopf's desires, as well as the fact that the VII Corps effectively stopped in place at 0130 hours on the morning of 28 February 1991 rather than continuing to advance until 0800, the official time for the cessation of offensive operations. One can easily identify the immediate or proximate causes of these lapses. Key individuals in the chain of command had had little sleep since the ground campaign started, and many were approaching physical and mental exhaustion; gaps had begun to open up between where friendly units actually were on the ground and where higher echelons thought they were; and, the clarity of communications, up as well as down the chain of command, had begun to deteriorate in the press of events. However, one can push the analysis deeper, and that is precisely what Richard Swain did in reflecting on what had occurred:

Douglas Southall Freeman notes that, during the American Civil War, "in the Army of Northern Virginia the men could stand almost anything for four days, but the fifth day in almost every instance they would crack." When judging the apparent unraveling of tight control on the night of 27-28 February [1991] by men who had had little rest for four days of movement and combat, one may well remember Freeman's warning: Beware of the fifth day. . . ." Interestingly enough, Major General Rupert Smith of the lst U.K. Armored Division began issuing written, rather than oral, orders to avoid confusion due to fatigue on the part of the sender and the receiver. (Note 11)

Swain attributes the loss of tight control to fatigue and fatigue directly recalls war's demands for physical exertion, one of Clausewitz's sources of general friction. When such exertions occur in time of war, though, the companion friction stemming from human lives being at stake, including one's own, is probably impossible to separate. For participants in combat units during sustained operations, the risk of death or mutilation is constant and compelling. Yet, even for high-level commanders like General Schwarzkopf, danger makes itself felt in terms of their personal responsibility for the men under their command. Bad decisions on their parts can get people killed unnecessarily, and this all-too-visceral danger can, and does, impose its own kind of friction.

The fact that Coalition forces appear to have run up against the same four-day limit on sustained operations in 1991 experienced by the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during 1862-1865 suggests that enduring human limitations are involved. (Note 12) These psychological and physical limitations are not as constant and precise across diverse individuals and groups as the temperature at which water freezes or the position of the moon in its orbit at some future time. And coherent operations can and have been sustained over longer periods than four days by insuring that combatants get sufficient sleep whenever the opportunity arises. (Note 13) Nevertheless, the underlying psychological and physical limitations not only appear to be every bit as real as the regularities in sciences like physics, but to be grounded, ultimately, in the environmental circumstances of the late (or upper) Pliocene, some 2-3 million years ago, that gave rise to the emergence of the genus Homo. It is also worth noting that, as Lionel Tiger emphasized, human cortical tissue developed in these evolutionary conditions "to facilitate action," particularly with respect to courtship and reproduction, not abstract thought. (Note 14)

There are, then, finite limits, grounded in biology and evolution, to the capabilities of humans to receive sensory data, orient themselves by integrating that input with prior experience and information, reach plausible decisions about what to do next, and act upon those decisions. (Note 15) Anytime the demands of combat begin to push participants toward those limits, much less up against them, various frictions begin to impede more and more effective observation, orientation, decisions, and actions. As many fighter pilots can attest from firsthand experience, the stresses of combat can quickly constrain sensory input, with auditory inputs from other crew and flight members being the first to go. Danger and physical exertion can also degrade orientation in a combat situation, precipitate poor decisions, and produce slow, ragged, or even flawed execution. In the extreme case of pilots realizing that they are about to lose an air-to-air encounter, individuals have been known to freeze to their sticks, straighten out, and run "right into their graves like men stricken blind who run, screaming, off a cliff." (Note 16) The consequences of such effects seem as potentially severe in future combat as they have often been in the past conflicts. Indeed, short of "reengineering" Homo sapiens at the genetic level, it is difficult to see how the potential adverse effects of exceeding these inherent biological limitations can be reliably reduced, much less eliminated, so long as humans and their purposes remain an integral part of war.

Biology, therefore, confers relative permanence on at least some sources of friction in war. The potential of danger and exertion to impede effective military operations is always there, just beneath the surface. Realistic training and actual combat experience can, as Clausewitz recognized, do much to keep these prospective impediments at bay, beneath the surface. However, like interrelated human potentials for sex and aggression that evolution has programmed in for at least 99 percent of the time Homo has been a distinct genus, the potential for a determined, capable adversary to push human combatants beyond their biological capacities for effective observation, orientation, decision making, and action seems an inherent, deeply programmed limitation. (Note 17) From this evolutionary perspective, technological solutions per se are almost certainly not possible so long as we remain human.

The theory of biological evolution has another implication for our thinking about Clausewitzian friction. The evidence and arguments presented so far suggest that the following sorts of propositions could form the basis of a reasonably comprehensive theory of war and conflict:

Proposition I: War is a violent, two-sided contest of opposing wills dominated by Clausewitzian friction.

Proposition II: Outcomes are highly contingent, and the various indirect effects or second-order consequences arising from a campaign or war may not be knowable until some time after the conflict has ended.

Proposition III: In combat, from moment to moment, it is the differential between the levels of general friction experienced by the two sides that matters most. (Note 18)

Proposition IV: So long as human purposes, frailties, proclivities, and limitations remain an integral part of war, Clausewitzian friction will retain the potential to make the difference between success and failure.

The salient observation about these four propositions for present purposes is that they are neither readily nor obviously amenable to the kind of quantification that enables tides or the positions of the planets to be precisely predicted indefinitely into the future. Only Proposition III offers any hint of a quantifiable, predictive relationship. But even in this instance some overarching metric for measuring the absolute level of friction experienced at a given moment by each side would be needed, and no such universal metric exists. In fact, it seems open to doubt whether such a metric is possible other than in a qualitative or conceptual sense. True, indicators like decision-cycle times and possibility spaces provide ways of gaining insight into the rough balance of general friction over the course of particular historical episodes. And the notion of possibility space relative to politico-military objectives might even provide the basis for a fairly comprehensive indicator of general friction. Still, we do not appear to have anything comparable to measurable physical quantities like temperature or velocity.

To push this last point a bit further, Isaac Newton originally formulated his famous second law of motion as: "The change of motion is proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed." (Note 19) In the mathematical notation of the calculus, the scalar version of this law is expressed by the equation where F is the impressed force, m is the mass of the object subjected to the force, v the object's velocity, t is time, and a is the object's acceleration (the time rate of change of v). When v is small compared to the speed of light, dm/dt approaches zero and we get the most familiar form of Newton's second law, F = ma. Moreover, force, mass, velocity, time, and acceleration, F, m, v, t, and a, are all physically measurable quantities.

As Ernst Mayr has emphasized, physicists since Newton have been strongly (and arrogantly) inclined to see these sorts of quantitative, predictive laws as "co-extensive with science." (Note 20) By implication, this attitude has led many in the so-called "hard" sciences to the prejudice that evolutionary biology is somehow not a full-fledged empirical science on a par with the Newtonian synthesis, or else is at best a proto-science still awaiting its Isaac Newton. The reason is that the principles of evolutionary biology established by Darwin and his successors are more like the four qualitative hypotheses just proposed about war than quantitative laws like F = ma. (Note 21)

Is the identification of science with quantitative, predictive laws defensible? To reiterate the fundamental point made early in the opening paragraphs of this section, evolution by means of natural selection is arguably the best confirmed theory in the history of science. Newtonian mechanics is not an exception since, strictly speaking, the Newtonian synthesis was supplanted by the relativistic mechanics of Albert Einstein early in this century, and both Newtonian and relativistic mechanics were then upstaged by the emergence of quantum mechanics during the 1920s. As a result, a major implication of Darwinian theory is to show that one cannot regard explanations as unscientific and "unsatisfactory" when they do not contain quantitative laws, "or when they are not such as to enable the event in question to have been predicted." (Note 22) Moreover, even that most quantitative of empirical sciences, physics, is not thoroughly quantitative down to its roots. As the mathematician and physicist Jules Henri Poincar( (1854-1912) rightly argued, the scientist's selection of which facts to pay attention to out of the practically infinite number of knowable facts, while by no means capricious or random, is ultimately based on qualitative judgments such as simplicity, repeatability, and beauty-judgments that defy quantification. (Note 23) Last but not least, Poincar('s most far-reaching contribution to mathematical physics was probably the creation of topology, a branch of mathematics that permits the qualitative analysis of dynamical systems. (Note 24) Topological methods enable one to obtain information about the global behavior of a dynamical system by constructing a geometric picture that is "totally inaccessible from the classical bash-out-a-formula viewpoint." (Note 25)

Two points follow from these observations. First, despite its heavily non-quantitative and non-predictive character, evolutionary biology is as legitimate an empirical science as anything in physics. Indeed, its lack of quantification arises from the contingency and diversity of the phenomena with which it deals. Second, for this very reason, evolutionary biology would appear to be a better paradigm for an overarching theory of war than, say, quantum physics. Regardless of how one feels about the detailed content of any of the four hypotheses offered above, they do illustrate the kinds of qualitative, but empirically refutable, propositions that an adequate science of war would require.