In the face of the evidence, I find it implausible that deception is anything even close to 50% of our brain power devoted to language. My reasons:
1) A cellphone must require 100′s of thousands of pages of documentation, not to mention a million lines of code or something like that. Deception is completely useless, even counterproductive in writing code, you HAVE to get that right in order for it to even get to the point where you can even start to debug it, let alone improve it. THe documentation for building a cell phone also must contain a tremendous amount of correct information if the incredibly complex phone is to actually have a prayer of working when it is put together. 2) I don’t believe you can study the history of philosophy and the sciences without marvelling at the extent to which brilliant humans extracted truth from confusion, and reported it. 3) Even in sex and seduction, where there can be deception, ( of course I love you, let me just put the tip in...) the bulk of the signalling is pretty accurate, with the more desirable women generally ending up with the more desirable men. 4) the person being deceived, on average, must derive more value from communication than harm or else communication would have been bred out of the species. That is, people who couldn’t communicate would have had an advantage due to their immunity from deception which was more than their disadvantage from not being able to coordinate. That language continues to exist and appears to be if anything wildly more valuable now than it was when it first evolved to me makes it clear that the engine is good information and yes, there are lots of deceptive strategies that thrive, but only as long as they are LESS successful than the underlying engine.
It is incredibly valuable to understand how systems are exploited in devious ways. But I think it is important to keep in context that deviousness can never exceed value creation in any kind of equilibrium.
The engineers working on various parts of the phone need to be profoundly honest in technical matters, yes. What about the middle-managers? Sales and advertising? A CEO attempting to justify his latest increases in pay to the board of directors?
My overriding point is that for communications to have evolved, it had to be providing much more truth than falsehood. My thinking is the net value communication provides the group comes from true communications, and false communications are a corruption, a way for individuals to take an excess share of value, to hurt the group even more than they themselves are benefited.
But if ever the utility of communication for taking from the group ever came even close in negative value to the group as its utility in providing to the group, it would have been selected away. Meanwhile, we live in an era of unprecedented productivity on almost every scale, all brought about by humans working in groups, so there can really be no doubt at all that currently, communication provides WAY more positive value to the group than opportunity for stealing/cheating to individuals. You can just see the net wealth piled up all over the place.
Antlers are a mechanism by which bucks compete, injuring each other. Growing the antlers in the first place is a significant metabolic cost. This is selected for, even though it’s not remotely a net benefit for the group in itself, because it allows stronger individuals to exclude weaker ones from mating. Is it so inconceivable that a communication channel full of mostly lies could serve some similar function, and thereby persist despite the obvious societal costs?
Intriguing ideas. I’m having to do mental gymnastics to think about the metaphor between antlers and communication.
Your comment does make me realize I have implicitly assumed that taking of resources through deceitful communication must be bad for the group, but this is not necessarily true. Perhaps bringing resources to the most clever liars does raise the groups fitness in a variety of plausible ways.
The kind of antler analogy I think of is if you had some very clever but not very strong moose who learned how to stick a log in his antlers making them more effective than they were without the log, and thus got to mate instead of a more physically fit moose mating. It is quite possible that this cleverness only helps him get laid, and does not trump the lack of strength he passes on to his offspring in terms of avoiding predators, and so the moose population is weakened by such cleverness: tricking girl mooses into sleeping with your gimpy self just makes mooses gimpier. But of course that kind of cleverness might also help a moose against predators, it would be up to the environment to decide that one, and so clever lying mooses (meese?) would just be another variation coming out to be tested in the population. Sexual selection always results in some variations with an obvious cost to the group winning over their alternative which is obviously better for the group: presumably sexual selection wins out because it speeds the process of variations being tested, you look at the world and all the non-sexual reproducers are SO MUCH SIMPLER than sexually selected.
In any case if I were to seriously pursue my truth/useful falsehood/parasitic ideas in evolution of language I would need to rethink them fleshing them out in light of these antler-induced thoughts. Thanks!
However, you seem to be overthinking the metaphor. An “honest” moose lacks antlers altogether; the metabolic cost of synthesizing antler-material is the cognitive cost of developing a coherent “story,” antler-related musculature is the social skill necessary to “sell” it, exhaustion and injuries inflicted by mating duels are the externalities. With no mating duels and the same resource inputs, an antler-less moose could be better at every other aspect of being a moose, including gathering additional food and running away from predators or trampling them to death, but would have no pressure to improve beyond subsistence.
This is selected for, even though it’s not remotely a net benefit for the group in itself, because it allows stronger individuals to exclude weaker ones from mating.
The evidence is overwhelming that sexual selection results in species that are better adapted to live in our world. The evidence is overwhelming that fighting or otherwise competing for mates is a winning strategy for a broad range of species. What is that overwhelming evidence? It is that the species that exist carry this feature to a very large extent. A moose population or subpopulation could easily have sampled less selective mating, it is unlikely that that natural experiment has not been done probably many times during the species lifetime of antlered competitors. And what is the result of those experiments? 10 point bucks!
Sexual selection is unambiguously good for the group according to the evidence, all the natural experiments out there that not only still carry antlers, but carry pretty big racks.
Just as central planning is better than free economies “in theory,” but actually it is only better if you ignore important aspects of reality, non-sexually-competitive meese are only better than the antlered “in theory” where the theory ignores the apparently overwhelming value of sexual selection.
As to exactly how best to torture the metaphor, I think I have abandoned the idea that lying, gaming the system, must occur at a lower rate than does direct communication in order for their to be survival value in communication. I think that reflected a prejudice that lying is “bad” and truth and building things is “good.” A prejudice I try to avoid and I think I had been failing. Now that lying is just another adaptation to consider, the complexity of the system could well wind up with a communication system filled with nothing but lies which still served the group. If in no other way, it could be a way for the clever to successfully compete against the beautiful for mates.
In the face of the evidence, I find it implausible that deception is anything even close to 50% of our brain power devoted to language. My reasons: 1) A cellphone must require 100′s of thousands of pages of documentation, not to mention a million lines of code or something like that. Deception is completely useless, even counterproductive in writing code, you HAVE to get that right in order for it to even get to the point where you can even start to debug it, let alone improve it. THe documentation for building a cell phone also must contain a tremendous amount of correct information if the incredibly complex phone is to actually have a prayer of working when it is put together.
2) I don’t believe you can study the history of philosophy and the sciences without marvelling at the extent to which brilliant humans extracted truth from confusion, and reported it.
3) Even in sex and seduction, where there can be deception, ( of course I love you, let me just put the tip in...) the bulk of the signalling is pretty accurate, with the more desirable women generally ending up with the more desirable men.
4) the person being deceived, on average, must derive more value from communication than harm or else communication would have been bred out of the species. That is, people who couldn’t communicate would have had an advantage due to their immunity from deception which was more than their disadvantage from not being able to coordinate. That language continues to exist and appears to be if anything wildly more valuable now than it was when it first evolved to me makes it clear that the engine is good information and yes, there are lots of deceptive strategies that thrive, but only as long as they are LESS successful than the underlying engine.
It is incredibly valuable to understand how systems are exploited in devious ways. But I think it is important to keep in context that deviousness can never exceed value creation in any kind of equilibrium.
The engineers working on various parts of the phone need to be profoundly honest in technical matters, yes. What about the middle-managers? Sales and advertising? A CEO attempting to justify his latest increases in pay to the board of directors?
My overriding point is that for communications to have evolved, it had to be providing much more truth than falsehood. My thinking is the net value communication provides the group comes from true communications, and false communications are a corruption, a way for individuals to take an excess share of value, to hurt the group even more than they themselves are benefited.
But if ever the utility of communication for taking from the group ever came even close in negative value to the group as its utility in providing to the group, it would have been selected away. Meanwhile, we live in an era of unprecedented productivity on almost every scale, all brought about by humans working in groups, so there can really be no doubt at all that currently, communication provides WAY more positive value to the group than opportunity for stealing/cheating to individuals. You can just see the net wealth piled up all over the place.
Antlers aren’t mutually beneficial.
Did the grandparent have antlers?
Perhaps, perhaps not. But they are truthful.
Antlers are a mechanism by which bucks compete, injuring each other. Growing the antlers in the first place is a significant metabolic cost. This is selected for, even though it’s not remotely a net benefit for the group in itself, because it allows stronger individuals to exclude weaker ones from mating. Is it so inconceivable that a communication channel full of mostly lies could serve some similar function, and thereby persist despite the obvious societal costs?
Intriguing ideas. I’m having to do mental gymnastics to think about the metaphor between antlers and communication.
Your comment does make me realize I have implicitly assumed that taking of resources through deceitful communication must be bad for the group, but this is not necessarily true. Perhaps bringing resources to the most clever liars does raise the groups fitness in a variety of plausible ways.
The kind of antler analogy I think of is if you had some very clever but not very strong moose who learned how to stick a log in his antlers making them more effective than they were without the log, and thus got to mate instead of a more physically fit moose mating. It is quite possible that this cleverness only helps him get laid, and does not trump the lack of strength he passes on to his offspring in terms of avoiding predators, and so the moose population is weakened by such cleverness: tricking girl mooses into sleeping with your gimpy self just makes mooses gimpier. But of course that kind of cleverness might also help a moose against predators, it would be up to the environment to decide that one, and so clever lying mooses (meese?) would just be another variation coming out to be tested in the population. Sexual selection always results in some variations with an obvious cost to the group winning over their alternative which is obviously better for the group: presumably sexual selection wins out because it speeds the process of variations being tested, you look at the world and all the non-sexual reproducers are SO MUCH SIMPLER than sexually selected.
In any case if I were to seriously pursue my truth/useful falsehood/parasitic ideas in evolution of language I would need to rethink them fleshing them out in light of these antler-induced thoughts. Thanks!
Mike
You’re quite welcome.
However, you seem to be overthinking the metaphor. An “honest” moose lacks antlers altogether; the metabolic cost of synthesizing antler-material is the cognitive cost of developing a coherent “story,” antler-related musculature is the social skill necessary to “sell” it, exhaustion and injuries inflicted by mating duels are the externalities. With no mating duels and the same resource inputs, an antler-less moose could be better at every other aspect of being a moose, including gathering additional food and running away from predators or trampling them to death, but would have no pressure to improve beyond subsistence.
The evidence is overwhelming that sexual selection results in species that are better adapted to live in our world. The evidence is overwhelming that fighting or otherwise competing for mates is a winning strategy for a broad range of species. What is that overwhelming evidence? It is that the species that exist carry this feature to a very large extent. A moose population or subpopulation could easily have sampled less selective mating, it is unlikely that that natural experiment has not been done probably many times during the species lifetime of antlered competitors. And what is the result of those experiments? 10 point bucks!
Sexual selection is unambiguously good for the group according to the evidence, all the natural experiments out there that not only still carry antlers, but carry pretty big racks.
Just as central planning is better than free economies “in theory,” but actually it is only better if you ignore important aspects of reality, non-sexually-competitive meese are only better than the antlered “in theory” where the theory ignores the apparently overwhelming value of sexual selection.
As to exactly how best to torture the metaphor, I think I have abandoned the idea that lying, gaming the system, must occur at a lower rate than does direct communication in order for their to be survival value in communication. I think that reflected a prejudice that lying is “bad” and truth and building things is “good.” A prejudice I try to avoid and I think I had been failing. Now that lying is just another adaptation to consider, the complexity of the system could well wind up with a communication system filled with nothing but lies which still served the group. If in no other way, it could be a way for the clever to successfully compete against the beautiful for mates.