Deception: Perspectives on Deceit in Humans and Nonhumans Mitchell, R. W., and Thompson, N. S., eds. 1986, Albany, New York:SUNY Press.
Mitchell and Thompson presented a case for deliberate deception practiced by various Great Apes. (My vague memory of their examples included animals that discovered food and gave out the call that indicated “still searching” to the rest of the troop and females grooming non-alpha males below a tree or ledge while keeping eye contactwith the alpha males as though they were simply sitting around doing nothing.) I do not know what final determination of these reports is currently accepted by the various scientific disciplines, but they certainly appear to be adaptive behaviors that would favor the individuals that practice them.
More recently, Julian Keenan of Montclair University has proposed that lying is innate, and not a learned behavior.
I don’t know how all this fits in to the “evolutionary” discussion, but I figured that there ought to be an occasional factoid included in the discussion, here.
And I’m sure you realize that “having a genetic basis” is not the same as “being shaped by natural selection”. The ability to build skyscrapers has, in a sense, a genetic basis, as it is our genes that give us both the physical and mental capacity to do so. However, it cannot be reasonably said that the ability to build skyscrapers is an evolutionary adaptation. What is selected for in this case is intelligence in general, as well as the whole opposable thumbs things, not “ability to build skyscrapers”.
Lying, and a whole suite of other behaviors, is much the same way. Our intelligence has a significant genetic basis, and has been molded by natural selection. But each behavior which is, in turn, a product of humanity’s complex intelligence, is not necessarily the result of natural selection. If such were the case, then we should be able to selectively breed out the trait, or selectively breed it in to create a compulsive liar who has no choice but to lie. And I have no doubt that neither can be done. There is a point where the ultimate genetic cause lies so buried in complexity that it becomes invisible to natural selection. My tendancy to get involved in these sorts of discussions, for example, is rooted, very deeply, in my human intelligence. It is not, however, the product of natural selection by any stretch of the imagination.
Consider the trait of lying, in and of itself. Many people, if not everyone, lies at some time or another. But not everyone lies about the same things. Some people are brutally honest about relationships, some lie about having eaten an extra cookie before dinner. The behavior is driven far more by motivations than by genetic stock. Again, the trait may be rooted in our intelligence, and the ability to analyze complex situations and determine possible outcomes, but the trait itself is not genetic in origin, and therefore invisible to natural selection, and thus, of no evolutionary benefit.
As for modern sociobiology, I know little of it, but if it’s anything like evolutionary psychology, I must admit to not thinking very highly of it. Too often, even scientists fall into the adaptationist trap, and feel they must come up with an adaptive explanation for each and every single behavioral trait exhibited by anyone. GIven that natural selection is not the sole mechanism which drives evoltuion, such an approach cannot help but be flawed. Societies are not organisms, and the mechanisms which shape organisms are not necessarily the same as those which shape societies. Use and disuse and inheritance of acquired characters, for example, both figure heavily into social evolution (learning, after all, is all about a form of inheritance of acquired characters, whereby behavioral traits acquired by one generation are passed on to the next), but have long since been discarded as potential mechanisms in biological evolution.
Julian Keenan’s work appears to deal more with deception in general, rather than lying specifically. There are countless examples of deception in nature, and there is no doubt that such is a valid survival trait. Deception and lying are not the same thing, though. And, on reading through some articles relating to his work, I find that he falls into adaptationist thinking, as I indicated above. For example, from here:
First, he indicates that it is a “lesson learned early”. Then he links it to high intelligence. Again, I say it is an emergent behavior associated with intelligence, and not under direct genetic control. Wherever you have intelligence being highly favored and thereby selected for, lying may well follow (as in apes). But, note that it is intelligence that is the selected trait.