Tip for Men and Women #37: The Machiavelli in all of us

A long overdue part two to my post RE: lying. My survey questions apparently didn't pique anybody's interest, but they're still up, so if it's not too much trouble...

So, anyway, where were we? Oh yes: we've got such large heads/brains because we need them to be better liars. This is called the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis, as expounded by Byrne and Whiten in the late 1980s.

**Oh, maybe I ought to have said this at the start: in this blog, we take evolution for granted as "the only theory in town". If you have any sympathy to creationism or intelligent design, feel free to not comment, because I just can't engage uncritical viewpoints in serious debate. Sorry.**

I'm saying this because it's important to remember that no matter how sophisticated we've become, we are, at bottom, animate reproduction machines. Our purpose is not to get a good job or help Katrina victims or have a closely-knit home life etc. Our purposes are to (1) survive and (2) replicate our genes. Everything else follows from this. So, from this perspective, it becomes perfectly clear that there is nothing different in kind between a flower's "deception" of a bee and a human's deception of her neighbour or spouse.

So, here are the broad strokes of the theory: pre-human creatures evolved into beings that found, due to certain physical frailties, that living in a society was the only way to survive. So, although any given being's biological priority is to ensure her own survival and replication, she discovered that helping guarantee others' survival and replication helped to guarantee her own. Yet, importantly, the inherent biological selfishness to value her own survival and replication over that of her neighbours remained intact. This is painfully illustrated in the hypothetical "tragedy of the commons".

So, evolving humans began to learn two things: (1) if I can deceive my neighbours into getting more of the goods that increase the chances of my survival and replication, I can sire more descendants. However, (2), if I get caught in my deception, my neighbours will either ostracise me or kill me. Thus, lying works only if one is a GOOD liar; otherwise, it's better to just be truthful.

As between good liars, bad liars, and truthful people, who will survive and replicate better? You guessed it: good liars, so their genes were passed on, whereas the other ones were systematically weeded out of existence.

Flash forward many generations, and the competition to be the best liar is merciless. Adaptation led to smarter humans who were more adept at deceiving their neighbours, which led to more complex deceptions, which led to further adaptation, and so on. And what physiological change enables this process of adaptation and increased complexity: the brains of humans are getting bigger, more complex, and thus more able to deceive better.

So, how's this for a sun-shiny Monday thought: everything around you: civilisation, technology, rule of law, politics, government, medicine, art, architecture, culture, food, music, sport, cinema, philosophy, literature, etc. are all made possible because our ancestors became very good at lying and deceiving others.

Have a nice day! :)