Can Nature Lie?
The lying that we humans do requires a more sophisticated kind of cognition than a bird, flower, or fungus can muster.
Analyzing animals to better understand Homo sapiens has become a sub-genre in the field of science writing. Sometimes this works well, as when Sabrina Imbler uses a purple octopus, starving to death while incubating her eggs, as a metaphor for disordered eating in How Far the Light Reaches. But other times, the enterprise feels downright Procrustean: An author amasses a wide swath of animal activities, even down to the level of the cell, and describes them in ways that might give the impression that some human quality has an analogue out there in the biosphere.
The compression is most strained when the activity being explained is complex and quintessentially human, such as deception. This makes the enterprise of writing The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars, a recent book by Lixing Sun, especially difficult. Sun, a professor of animal behavior, ecology, and evolution at Central Washington University, presents a string of entertaining facts about the many ways plants and animals use trickery to survive. But the language is too casually anthropomorphic, undermining the points he's trying to make about cheating in the natural world. At the outset, Sun acknowledges that ascribing intentionality to animal behavior is “neither easy nor necessary,” and admits that deceptive adaptations arise from the unplanned march of evolution. “Cheating flourishes in nature as a direct result of natural selection,” he writes. It also “serves as a potent selective force that drives evolution on its own.” But his word choices and awkward phrasing often leave the reader with only a partial understanding of how flora and fauna actually "lie" and "deceive."
The behavior we think of as lying requires a more sophisticated kind of cognition than telling the truth does—and certainly a more sophisticated kind of cognition than a bird, flower, or fungus can muster. Years ago, when I was reporting an article about the science of deception, the psychologist Paul Ekman told me that a liar needs three qualities to succeed: the ability to think strategically, like a good chess player; the ability to read the needs of others, like a talented therapist; and the ability to manage emotions, like a grown-up. In other words, a good liar needs a high level of both cognitive and emotional intelligence.
And though lying—at least in humans—might be an ingenious skill, the evolution through which cheating arises in the natural world is not smart in the least. The way Sun describes each example makes it seem that plants and animals develop particular traits of fakery or mimicry out of some sort of mischievous, cunning impulse. But there’s nothing deliberate about evolutionary adaptation, which is the perpetuation of traits, arising randomly, that improve an organism’s chance of staying alive, reproducing, and passing along the same advantageous traits to the next generation. It’s a stupid process, lacking not only intentionality but also any kind of end goal beyond helping a particular organism survive and reproduce.
Sun knows this; he’s a biology professor, after all. But the diction he deploys suggest otherwise. Sun, like others, falls into the science-writing trap of stretching biological phenomena to fit the contours of human understanding. As a result, the reader can be forgiven for coming away with the impression that cheating fauna and flora—right down to the level of bacteria—are clever enough to always have, as he puts it in one of his many awkward attempts to be engaging, a few new “ruses up their sleeves.”
According to Sun, nature’s cheats come in two varieties: liars and deceivers. Lying adheres to what he calls the First Law of Cheating: “falsifying messages in signaling.” Deceiving falls under his Second Law: “exploitation of biases, weaknesses, or deficits in the cognitive systems of another animal.”
But to illustrate these laws—indeed, even to define them—Sun uses terms that suggest intentionality; how else would you expect a lay audience to interpret active verbs like falsifying and exploiting? But such an interpretation would be misleading. As Sun himself notes, evolution is a mindless process, with no plan, no direction, nothing except the fluke of a selective advantage generated by a completely arbitrary genetic blip.
His colorful word choices—no doubt employed to make his writing more accessible and fun—seem to elide this randomness altogether. He uses terms such as imposters, hustlers, and con artists to describe the book’s animals, including Pacific tree frogs, and talks of the “tricks” that were “invented” by the duplicitous cuckoo. He uses words like these to characterize cheats that don’t even have nervous systems, such as the South American passion flower. It has evolved spots on its leaves that resemble the eggs of the Heliconius butterfly, which cause the butterfly to avoid laying its clutch there and instead move on to a plant that looks unoccupied—a handy deflection, what Sun calls a “most peculiar form of plant mimicry,” because newly hatched Heliconius caterpillars can be quite destructive to the passion flower. As Sun chooses to describe it, those yellow spots arose because “these plants can ‘read the mind’ of Heliconius butterflies.” But in truth, no plant ESP is involved; those fake-out butterfly eggs are the result of a random mutation in leaf coloration that turned out to have a benefit for the mutant plant. And using scare quotes around “read the mind” doesn’t get the author off the hook. (Nor do scare quotes help when he describes the offspring of the normally monogamous dark-eyed junco as “birds born out of ‘wedlock.’”)
If you’re looking for a compilation of weird facts about the splendors of the natural world—something that’s been called the “gee-whiz” approach to science writing—this book delivers. It is an often-enlightening collection of some stunning acts of animal trickery that have evolved in the brutal Darwinian struggle for survival. Dropping some of the tidbits you picked up here would make you the hit of the cocktail party. Did you know, for instance, that the stripes of a zebra create a confusing effect called “razzle dazzle,” and that their advantage may be in keeping away tsetse flies? Then there’s the cuckoo, one of the most notorious fakes on the planet, which deposits its own egg in the nest of one of as many as a dozen other bird species, tossing out one of the eggs that belong there and forcing the deceived mother to hatch and nurture its own newborn instead. And the sphinx caterpillar emits a whistle that mimics the alarm call of one of its predators, the chickadee, causing the chickadee to abandon its would-be meal and dive for cover.
In the last chapters of the book, Sun tries to draw a straight line from these many organisms to humans. We can, he writes, “use our newly acquired evolutionary understanding of how cheaters operate to design novel strategies to combat cheating in our society.” But that seems a fool’s errand, missing much of the sophistication that deception in our own species entails. Yes, Sun acknowledges that cheating in humans is much richer in “scale, variety, intricacy, [and] novelty” than it is in other animals. And yes, he attributes this richness to our unique language ability, greater intelligence, and complex social structure. But as he attempts to cover a wide range of human deception—including Ponzi schemes, lies on social media, and infidelity—he doesn’t actually have anything fresh or illuminating to offer.
Sun’s desire to draw lessons from the natural world about human lies has a subtler danger: Other living things are not just furry or feathery little proto-people, and comparing their behavior to ours risks underappreciating them as the amazing organisms they are. The astounding variety of the biosphere, evolved through random mutations over the course of eons, is reason enough to marvel at all the ways that certain surprising conduct has helped plants and animals thrive. So my recommendation is to read The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars for its great cocktail-party fodder, and to leave lessons about human deception to the psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers.
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