On Beavers, nature's perfect analogy for Silicon Valley tech
The Last Word On Nothing

If you know anything about beavers, it’s likely that they build dams. Natures engineers, they’re called. Eager beavers are up and at ‘em, ready to build complex structures with the simplest materials in just the right spot to stop a river from flowing. In fact, engineering schools across the country — MIT, Oregon State, American River College to name a few — use the beaver as a mascot for this reason. What better animal to represent future engineers than one that builds?
Well, I recently read a book called Animal Constructions and Technological Knowledge by Ashely Shew that made clear that beavers are in fact the perfect mascot for technologists in Silicon Valley, but not in the way they might like.

Beavers are herbivorous rodents that can weigh up to 60 pounds and live up to 24 years — true rodents of unusual size. They can remain underwater for 15 minutes without surfacing, and have a naturally oily and waterproof coat. Their eyelids are transparent, and function like goggles. None of these things have to do with the analogy I’m about to make, they’re just cool facts about beavers.
Anyway, on to the dams. “Beaver dams go so far as to rival the designs of the dwelling structures of some early humans and some bad campers,” Shew wrote in a paper that predates her book. But not all individual groups of beavers (or colonies) build dams. If a beaver family is living in a place that doesn’t require dam building — usually because there’s already a lake present for them, or the river is too large for them to dam up — they don’t build a dam.
This presents an interesting question for beaver researchers: is there any difference between dam building beavers, and non-dam building beavers, other than their location? In other words: if a group of beavers that had never built a dam in their lives suddenly came upon water, would they begin to build? Or do they not know how?
To answer this question, a researcher gathered up a bunch of beavers, some living near water and some living away from water, and swapped them. And lo and behold, after what was certainly a bit of a shock at their new environment, the beavers who had never built dams started taking down trees and building. And their counterparts, the beavers that came from a wet place, didn’t take down any trees at all. (Shew calls this experiment “Trading Spaces: Beaver Edition.”)
Of course, being researchers, this was interesting but raised further questions. What about the habitat made the formerly dam-free colony begin to fell trees and build? How much planning and thinking were they doing about where to put the dam and how to build it?
To find out, a graduate student planted a tape recorder in the leaves near a colony living away from any water, and had it play the sound of running water. When they returned the next day, they were surprised to find that the beavers had immediately started felling trees. “Sticks and twigs and leaves had been brought and placed on top of the tape recorder,” Shew told me recently.
Rather than surveying their domain to see where the dam might work best, it was all far simpler than that. The beavers seemed to build their dam simply at the loudest source of sound. Of course for beavers this instinct works. The stream tends to be loudest at its narrowest spot, which is coincidentally the best place to build a dam.
But this casts a bit of a shadow on our view of beavers and their keen engineering skills, doesn’t it? “People always talk about how smart it is that beavers build dams in the narrowest part of the stream, that shows that they are intelligent and think about the engineering of their dam building activity,” Shew said. “But in fact the nearest part of the stream is also where it’s loudest. So so you’re trying to cover that loud sound up.”
In other words, beavers are probably not, as we once thought, thoughtful about their construction. They are not deeply considering their landscape, and thinking about where a dam might best serve their colony. They’re simply trying to make the sound of water go away — even if there is no water at all.
And this, I think, is the perfect analogy for Silicon Valley. Tech companies are not, largely, trying to survey their world and see what it really needs. They’re not trying make housing affordable, or tackle the water crisis in Flint, or the extremes of income inequality and racial prejudice in the United States. They’re simply building dams in the place where the stream sounds loud to them — even when there might not be any water there at all.

Image via Wikipedia
