The book’s most important underpinning idea is that deceit is evolutionarily advantageous in a thousand ways. Trivers is an expert on evolution, so he’s interested in everything from camouflaged bottom-dwelling sea creatures to infants who exaggerate a temporary plight - a skinned knee, hunger - to extract disproportionate parental response. Everything is part of a long-run evolutionary struggle; individual vs. individual, species vs. species, and even husband vs. wife. Trivers’s knowledge of a range of disparate subjects is impressive, even if it is at times delivered in a semi-haughty tone.
Zooming in from the evolution of group interaction to the adaptations of neurology, Trivers writes in depth about how poor our brains are at grasping anything that could be considered an “objective’’ reality. We’re constantly fooling ourselves. “At every single stage,’’ Trivers writes, “from its biased arrival, to its biased encoding, to organizing it around false logic, to misremembering and then misrepresenting it to others, the mind continually acts to distort information flow in favor of the usual good goal of appearing better than one really is.’’
So what happens when we use our easily fooled brains and ingrained tendencies toward deceit to try to undertake big, complicated endeavors? The deceit sometimes wins, and often to disastrous effect. Trivers summons striking examples of aviation disasters that can be traced back to some form of deceit - the rapidly icing wing brushed aside as not worth worrying about, the second-in-command in an airline cockpit failing, out of respect for rank, to correct an in-retrospect-obvious mistake by the captain. Some of the cases are more compelling than others, but all highlight the catastrophies that can result when we remain blissfully ignorant of how our brains work to undermine prudence.
