Welcome to the first time a NYT review actually has me excited to read a book… and take a picture of it…beside a gin cocktail on my coffee table. Ok. That’s a lie, I’ve done that before. Robert Trivers, a biological theorist, writes about our biological need to lie, and calls deceit:
“… a deep feature” of life, even a necessity, given genes’ brutal struggle to prevail.
Our big brains and communication skills make us master dissemblers. Even before we can speak, Trivers notes, we learn to cry insincerely to manipulate our caregivers. As adults, we engage in “confirmation bias,” which makes us seize on facts that bolster our preconceptions and overlook contradictory data. We wittingly and unwittingly inflate the qualities of ourselves and others in our religious, political or ethnic group. We denigrate those outside our in-group as well as sexual and economic rivals.
Lying to survive. From little lies you tell everyday just to get by, rising all the way up to political/ wide spread social brainwashing, this sounds like my jam. And something else about this resonates -and I have no idea why:
Trivers is not an elegant stylist like Dawkins, Wilson or Pinker. His technical explanations can be murky, his political rants cartoonishly crude. But Trivers’s blunt, unpolished manner — which I assume is not feigned — makes me trust him more than some slicker writers.
(I think you guys get it.) Robert Trivers, everyone, get to know him.
