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In case you study X-Risks and haven’t yet read the book Animal Weapons: The Evolution of Battle, this post is meant to flag it as an important book for understanding the factors which lead to arms races, and to summarize the book’s findings as they relate to the study and prevention of X-Risks. The book is written by Douglas Emlen, an evolutionary biologist researching the circumstances which lead to the evolution of large and expensive weapons in animals (think elephant tusks, beetle horns, extravagant deer antlers, and oversized crab claws.) Emlen demonstrates how these same circumstances also lead to arms races in human combat technologies.

The main takeaways for x-risk concerned readers, as I see them:

In order to occur, arms races require three ingredients: evolutionary competition, economic defensibility, and one-on-one duels. These three ingredients apply to the evolution of large weapons across the animal kingdom, as well as across historical arms races in human combat technology.

When these three ingredients cease to be in place, the arms race ends. (This makes this book important for any EAs concerned about technology-driven X-risks, as it can help us identify causes of arms races and potential paths to ending them).

The high cost of making large weapons make them honest signals of strength, and therefore effective deterrents. As a result, in animal species with large weapons, conflicts rarely escalate to costly, full-scale combat. For humans, this means we should focus on decreasing access to existential-risk-bearing weapon developments.

Ever since humans developed weapons of mass destruction, we have been playing an unprecedented game, wherein if a single pair of individuals (states) ever does choose to fight, the whole species may go extinct.

So far, deterrence has worked, but deterrence depends on large weapons being costly to obtain. The cost of obtaining nuclear warheads has fallen significantly in recent decades, eliminating a key ingredient of deterrence. As more and more countries obtain them, the unprecedented danger grows.

And a personal note: the author warns about the ease with which a state can obtain a nuclear warhead. I would add that developments in biosynthe...

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