Quote:
Originally Posted by The Omega Concern
I think your point about the apes is where the foundation of this dishonesty you speak to resides.
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actually it seems to lie in way older and simpler species. i ended up writing a lot about evolutionary game theory; even single cells of bacteria play cooperation and deception games with each other. you don't even need a brain to do it. like e. coli generally cooperates, but when there is some kind of event such as reduced feeding resources or the introduction of an antibiotic etc, most of them die but some become super strong and their genotype changes. and then later if there's another issue they will totally defect and outcompete all of the other, weaker e. coli cells. however, as long as there is no incentive to defect, they will always cooperate, and cooperator e. coli cells fair better, generally, in normal environments. so there is this push and pull going on.
it's very similar to ideas of how society runs on cooperation and competition. those who are good at deceit do well in certain areas at certain times, but generally we all do better when we all cooperate. so there is a niche for deception in certain situations but the evolutionary stable strategy is to overwhelmingly cooperate.
however this really only touches on the biological aspects of deception. there are also social and cognitive reasons that are tied to evolutionary ideas of survival and inclusive fitness. so basically, in my draft i've explained all of this much more coherently and gotten to the point where i'm going to talk about why we lie in everyday life (impression management, avoidance of conflict, avoidance of punishment, etc) as a kind of more complex version of biological game theory. i havent written much about this yet. my draft was incomplete.