The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars

“A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year”“Winner of the PROSE Award in Popular Science and Mathematics, Association of American Publishers”“The world is full of liars, a fact brilliantly depicted in Lixing Sun’s slender but important book about cheating and deception among animals and plants, as well as that hairless bipedal species that is the biggest deceiver of them all… . A tour de force of evolutionary biology… . Fascinating.”—David P. Barash, Wall Street Journal“The accessible prose offers an eye-opening take on lying in the natural world and how evolutionary pressures to deceive impact human behavior. The smart parallels between humans and animals make for an insightful outing.” * Publishers Weekly *”[An] intriguing introduction to the domain of dishonesty.”—Tony Miksanek, Booklist“Buckle up for a riveting journey into the wide world of deception.”—Marc Bekoff, Psychology Today“Lixing Sun treats this topic with both a serious scientific demeanour and a welcome injection of wry humour.”—David Gascoigne, Travels with Birds“Fascinating”—Patricia MacDuff, British Naturalists Association News Bulletin“The author has managed the seemingly impossible by making quite complex theories and rules both enjoyable to read about and relatively easy to understand.”—Terry Freedman, Teachwire“Through various enlightening and entertaining examples … Sun (Central Washington Univ.) educates readers about the biological underpinnings of deceiving—by exploiting cognitive loopholes—and lying—by altering truthful information in communication—for which demonstrating the cheater’s intention is neither easy nor necessary in nonhuman species.”—J-B. Leca, Choice

Lixing Sun is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Central Washington University. He is the author of The Fairness Instinct: The Robin Hood Mentality and Our Biological Nature and the coauthor of The Beaver: Natural History of a Wetlands Engineer.