Aug 22, 2023 03:54 PM
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...ew/674808/
EXCERPT: . . . 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... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: . . . 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... (MORE - missing details)
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