Ecological and evolutionary models for homeland security strategy

Biological organisms have developed a remarkable number of strategies to mitigate conflict with a broad range of adversaries in their environment. The diversity and success of these strategies, as illustrated by the millions of extant species on the Earth today, suggests that biological evolution may be a field rich with lessons for guiding societal conflict resolution and security strategy. The working group will bring leading security policy analysts together with evolutionary biologists, anthropologists and ecologists to draw on their expertise and identify evolutionary strategies that are applicable to security challenges faced by people, institutions and nations in the 21st century. These biological analogies will be developed into models of decision-making and behavior to explore alternative hypotheses related to strategies for security planning. The combination of biological and policy-oriented perspectives will allow both a rich theoretical discussion and a realistic assessment of the barriers to practical applications of theory.