(Please note, this would often be referred to as a disinformation campaign, because it is purposefully intended to mislead. At the same time, the other side works to combat this misinformation campaign.

One side attempts to mislead the public over a key issue – the safety of a drug, whether climate change is real, or whether vaccines are dangerous, for example. We might call this an informational arms race. As regulators identify these tactics, and seek to neutralise them, pharmaceutical companies find new ways to shape research. Pharmaceutical companies deploy an ever-evolving set of tactics to influence medical knowledge. The philosopher of science Bennett Holman has argued that the interactions between pharmaceutical companies and the regulatory bodies that seek to determine if drugs are safe and effective constitute an arms race. But some human arms races are more subtle. The term arms race, of course, comes from countries at war who literally amass ever-more sophisticated and powerful weapons. Still, at any point, the only thing that makes sense is to keep escalating.Īrms races happen in the human world too. And, along the way, each side expends a great deal of effort. Neither wins the race because, as one gets better, so does its opponent. Sometimes, the cheetah catches its prey, and sometimes the gazelle escapes. One hallmark of an arms race is that, at the end, the participants are often just where they started. A host of weirder examples come from the biology of sex, where males and females evolve bizarre adaptations to control reproduction, ranging from sperm plugs in bats, to cork-screw penises in ducks, to vaginas filled with deceptive dead-ends (also ducks). Over time, these species have evolved for speed, each responding to the other’s adaptations. In biology, a classic example comes from cheetahs and gazelles. Arms races happen when two sides of a conflict escalate in a series of ever-changing moves intended to outwit the opponent.

Combat arms classic pay to win