NATURE'S HIDDEN AGENDA

FROM MOLECULES TO MANKIND, DECEPTION SEEMS A PART OF LIFE

IF IT'S NOT NICE to fool Mother Nature, then there's a terrible double standard at work: A new and growing body of research indicates that the old gal can be a ferociously cunning dissembler.

Viruses con the immune system. Adulterous birds keep a secret second mate in distant woods. Male flies enact transsexual charades to fleece rival suitors. Chimps lie to their fellows about food sources. Across the spectrum of living things, deception is much more widespread than previously suspected; in fact, it may be an integral, even preferred, aspect of animal life.

Nature can reward such behavior handsomely: Genetically speaking, good guys finish last when treachery increases the likelihood of eating better and breeding more often -- which tends to assure even more duplicity in the next generation. At the biotic bottom line, evolution often favors the fraudulent.

That's the dismaying conclusion of a cadre of theorists specializing in biocultural approaches to faunal deceit. "Nature offers niches for deceivers at every level in the organization of life, from one-celled organisms to complex confidence scams," Luther College theologian Loyal D. Rue told a symposium on "The Evolution of Deception" at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science here. "There is now sufficient evidence to warrant the conclusion that deception is often adaptive and not exclusively human."

If subsequent study confirms this thesis, then humans may have to rethink not only their Bambiesque moral notions of nature -- wherein animals act in guileless candor and only man is vile -- but their ethical concepts as well. After all, if species as diverse as bacteria, bugs, birds and baboons frequently deceive others -- or even their own kind -- is it "unnatural" or "aberrant" for humans to lie and cheat?

Thanks to the burgeoning body of scientific evidence, that question is getting hard to ignore. So is the possibility that the ability and motivation to deceive increase directly with intelligence, culminating in human beings' celebrated talent for the most intricate deception -- the capacity to fool ourselves. Some radical theorists think it may be our most distinctive accomplishment, surpassing even pizza delivery, air fresheners and disco.

"All animals are able to think, and many can use tools," says Washington University anthropologist Robert Sussman. "Self-deception is what separates us qualitatively from all other animals and even early hominids." The earliest evidence of civilization, from burial rituals to cave paintings, are an attempt to "create worlds that don't exist." In fact, he argues, "instead of calling humans the 'thinking' or 'wise' being, we should call them the 'deceiving' being."

From this perspective, all human culture is merely an attempt to clothe the intolerably naked emperor of empirical reality in the delusive raiments of value, virtue and meaning. "Culture is by definition self-deceptive," Sussman says. But "it is essential for human existence," or at least for pro-social or altruistic behavior. That is, the too-carefully examined life may not be worth living.

"Humans are unable to achieve the two things that really matter to us -- personal wholeness and social coherence -- without deception," says Rue. "Cultures achieve these two goals by making large, comprehensive cultural myths. Without them, we don't have the resources for survival."

Unfortunately for the psychic commonweal, the evolution of ever more effective deceptive techniques provokes a sort of bio-espionage race, leading to the counter-evolution of more sophisticated deception-detection abilities. Thus owls with better eyesight will be able to discern more mice on the forest floor; as a result, mice who are more deceptively colored will live longer and pass on more of their concealment traits, prompting the evolution of yet more discerningly vigilant owls, and so forth.

On the human global scale, Rue and others believe, the analogous process ensures that we will be undeceived by our own intricate self-delusions at intervals, and left to thrash about mythless for a time. The present era, Rue argues, is one of those times: At least in the industrial West, such once-dependable belief systems as Judeo-Christian morality, Marxism and communism are no longer convincing. The world, he says, needs a new repertoire of "noble lies." Constructing them will require not only considerable sociobiological ingenuity, but will demand, Rue says, that we "challenge our conventional bias against deception" and understand how extensively it pervades nature. Sex, Lies and Fireflies

In the standard neo-Darwinian view, life is the way competing gene teams keep score. Winning organisms (the most adaptive, sexiest or "fittest") survive to convey more of their DNA to future generations; losers (the maladapted, mateless or "unfit") pass on less. Whatever combination of genes eventually predominates will characterize a species. Personal-fulfillment-wise, the process is a bit grim. Any given individual is merely the transient medium, not the long-term message: "A hen," Samuel Butler wrote in 1877, "is only an egg's way of making another egg."

There are numerous ways to secure a reproductive advantage. Many involve sending accurate sexual and dominance information. In the more social species, even acts of altruism can contribute to natural selection as long as members of a kinship group sacrifice for one another: If two organisms share the same genes, and one aids the other in a way that increases those genes' contribution to subsequent generations, then altruism will be reinforced and even increase in the long run.

But many creatures great and small gain fitness -- and thus reproductive advantage -- by self-interest and outright deception. Various pathogens use camouflage to coat themselves with proteins that keep them from being recognized and destroyed by the immune system; similarly, protective coloration allows moths, reptiles and rodents to avoid predators by blending in with the landscape. When an ordinary house cat feels itself threatened, its hairs will stand on end, making the cat appear larger (and presumptively more dangerous) to an adversary. Such simple strategies have been familiar for decades.

But in the past 10 years, an increasing number of researchers -- influenced by Harvard zoologist Edward O. Wilson's revolutionary synthesis of biology and social behavior known as "sociobiology" as well as by the growing sophistication of such fields as primatology and ethology -- have found that living things employ a much more complex and varied range of deceptive techniques than formerly suspected.

Of course, "the interaction between two organisms need not involve intentionality and nefarious motives to be deceptive," says Ursula Goodenough, a microbiologist at Washington University. But it's hard not to admire the ingenious bait-and-switch ploy used by the protozoa that cause sleeping sickness. Once it's in the blood stream, the host's immune system detects a certain protein on the protozoan's surface and starts generating antibodies. Whereupon the parasite simply switches to one of 1,000 other surface proteins it can deploy, eventually exhausting the host's immune reserves in trying to find the "right" antibodies for an ever-changing arsenal of antigens.

The farther up the food chain, the more seemingly deliberate the deceit. Copious examples can be found in "How Monkeys See the World," the new book by primatologists Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth of the University of Pennsylvania. They cite the male scorpionfly "who can only copulate with a female if he first provides her with a nuptial gift of a dead insect." Male flies who lack such offerings may "steal insects by approaching males who already have them and adopting the posture and behavior of females."

Rue cites an African beetle that kills a few itinerant ants, sucks out their fluids, and then sticks the carcasses on its body. Thus disguised, it can gain entry to an ant colony for high-volume slaughter. Certain male fireflies learn to mimic the distinctive flash of a willing female and then eat the arriving would-be suitors who respond to the signal.

Or consider a bird called the pied flycatcher: Females generally avoid mating with males who already have a mate and who don't control extensive quality territory. So males frequently establish a second territory as far as two miles away. Why? "One explanation," Cheney and Seyfarth write, "is that they function to deceive, since they prevent females from determining if a male is already mated."

Simian trysts can also entail elaborate ruses. If a female hamadryas baboon wants to fool around grooming a subadult male, she risks the indignant wrath of a dominant male. One female who was thus inclined -- but who found herself within sight of such a male -- got around the problem this way: As the object of her attentions crouched out of sight behind a rock, the female gradually worked herself into a position where the dominant male could see her head and back, but not her arms -- which were busily grooming the young fellow.

The more intelligent the animal, the more likely it is to deceive members of its own species, says Sussman. "In primates, we see tactical deception used in social contexts." (For example, voluntary misdirection of others away from food sources.) "That does not occur at all in prosimians, and very little in monkeys. But we see it a lot in chimpanzees and gorillas." In Search of a New Mythology

At the ostensibly highest level of primate life -- human society -- our potential for monstrously elaborated fraud is matched only by our apparently unique capacity for self-deception.

On the personal level, this takes the form of downplaying negative information about oneself or one's environment -- not, on the face of it, an adaptive trait. However, says biologist Robert Trivers of the University of California at Santa Cruz, it may have evolutionary advantages: "It furthers the deception of others. If you can deceive yourself, you can cut off cues to a competitor" -- signs of hesitance or weakness that he might use to his advantage -- and "it allows an individual to be more convincing." This can backfire horrendously, Trivers notes, when it afflicts, say, airline pilots who prefer to believe the best even as the worst is happening -- as in the case of Washington's Air Florida disaster.

On the macrosocietal level, says Goodenough, "deceptions throughout our culture and in nature operate much like viruses." That is, a TV commercial "acts upon the same premise as a virus deceiving the immune system." (A similar concept, whereby the propagation of "memes" -- basic units of cultural transmission -- parallels the spread of genes, has been advanced by Oxford University zoologist Richard Dawkins.) However, such pan-social self-deception may be the best -- and even the only -- way to prompt altruistic behavior among persons who do not share genetic kinship bonds. "We need something all humans can believe in," says Goodenough, some benevolent "suspension of disbelief."

Unfortunately, most modern societies have "developed an immunity to mythological thinking," Rue says -- largely because what we regard as social progress has focused so relentlessly on undeceiving ourselves about dozens of notions from magic and theocracy to racial and sexual sterotypes to the quality of consumer goods and the truthfulness of government pronouncements. "The record of Western culture," he says, "can be better described as a flight from deception than as a quest for truth." Enormous benefits have resulted. Yet "the survival of Western culture" depends on "a vision of a world infused with value that is so imaginative and compelling that it can't be resisted" -- a shared charismatic mythos that "contradicts the self-evident truth of self-interest" and "is so beautiful and satisfying that it will appear non-optional."

Rue speculates that as the influence of orthodox religions wanes, the new emphasis may shift to ecology, since it "is noble of the species to defer to the interests of the biosphere."

The Gospel According to Greenpeace? Perhaps. It's up to our latter-day mythologists. "It is only when cultures lack the aesthetic resources for effective mass deception that they begin to dissolve into anarchy or stiffen into despotism," he says. Thus "the challenge of our time is ultimately aesthetic: It remains for artists, poets, novelists, musicians, filmmakers, tricksters and masters of illusion to winch us toward our salvation by seducing us into an embrace with a noble lie."

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