The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars - by Lixing Sun

Book Synopsis

A natural history of cheating from selfish genes to lying politicians

Nature is rife with cheating. Possums play possum, feigning death to cheat predators. Crows cry wolf to scare off rivals. Amphibians and reptiles are inveterate impostors. Even genes and cells cheat. The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars explores the evolution of cheating in the natural world, revealing how dishonesty has given rise to wondrous diversity.

Blending cutting-edge science with a wealth of illuminating examples--from microscopic organisms to highly intelligent birds and mammals--Lixing Sun shows how cheating in nature relies on two basic rules. One is lying, by which cheaters exploit honest messages in communication signals and use them to serve their own interests. The other is deceiving, by which cheaters exploit the biases and loopholes in the sensory systems of other creatures. Sun demonstrates that cheating serves as a potent catalyst in the evolutionary arms race between the cheating and the cheated, resulting in a biological world teeming with complexity and beauty.

Brimming with insight and humor, The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars also looks at the prevalence of cheating in human society, identifying the kinds of cheating that spur innovation and cultural vitality and laying down a blueprint for combatting malicious cheating such as fake news and disinformation.

Review Quotes

"A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year"

"Buckle up for a riveting journey into the wide world of deception."---Marc Bekoff, Psychology Today

"Fascinating"---Patricia MacDuff, British Naturalists Association News Bulletin

"Lixing Sun treats this topic with both a serious scientific demeanour and a welcome injection of wry humour."---David Gascoigne, Travels with Birds

"The author has managed the seemingly impossible by making quite complex theories and rules both enjoyable to read about and relatively easy to understand."---Terry Freedman, Teachwire

"The world is full of liars, a fact brilliantly depicted in Lixing Sun's slender but important book about cheating and deception among animals and plants, as well as that hairless bipedal species that is the biggest deceiver of them all. . . . A tour de force of evolutionary biology. . . . Fascinating."---David P. Barash, Wall Street Journal

"Through various enlightening and entertaining examples . . . Sun (Central Washington Univ.) educates readers about the biological underpinnings of deceiving--by exploiting cognitive loopholes--and lying--by altering truthful information in communication--for which demonstrating the cheater's intention is neither easy nor necessary in nonhuman species."---J-B. Leca, Choice

"Winner of the PROSE Award in Popular Science and Mathematics, Association of American Publishers"

"[An] intriguing introduction to the domain of dishonesty."---Tony Miksanek, Booklist

"The accessible prose offers an eye-opening take on lying in the natural world and how evolutionary pressures to deceive impact human behavior. The smart parallels between humans and animals make for an insightful outing."-- "Publishers Weekly"

About the Author

Lixing Sun is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Central Washington University. He is the author of The Fairness Instinct: The Robin Hood Mentality and Our Biological Nature and the coauthor of The Beaver: Natural History of a Wetlands Engineer.