User:MadScientistX11/FollyOfFools

The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life (2011, Basic Books, ISBN 0465027555) is a book that examines the evolutionary explanations for deceit and self deception. Trivers focuses primarily on humans but he includes examples from many other organisms as well. Trivers' starting point is to illustrate that self deception is something of an evolutionary puzzle. While the evolutionary benefits to deceiving other organisms are obvious at first glance it seems highly counter intuitive to think that it could ever be in the evolutionary interest of an organism to deceive itself.

In the book Trivers discusses the evolutionary reasons for animals engaging in self-deception. He provides numerous examples of this both at the individual level and at the societal level, eventually discussing examples of self-deception in the history of the United States and Israel.

The essence of his analysis is that "the primary reason we fool ourselves is to fool others". Humans are exceptionally good at picking up various verbal and physical cues (e.g., speech intonation, eye movements,...) that indicate when another human is practicing deception. There are many situations such as playing "chicken" and seeing who will back down first, where it can actually benefit an organism to deceive itself, by so doing the organism can better deceive others.

Content
The Folly of Fools was Trivers' first (and to date only) book written for a general audience. Trivers was very well known within the academic community for his definition of reciprocal altruism and other significant contributions to sociobiology. However, he was not very well known outside the academic community before this book. In trying to reach a general audience, Trivers combined an academic style with summaries of many psychological experiments along with anecdotal examples from his own life. One of the distinguishing features of the book, which some reviewers loved and others hated, were these anecdotes and Trivers' ability to present his own foibles as examples that illustrate his theory.

The Evolutionary logic of self deception
Trivers begins by describing his approach to understanding human behavior and social relations via natural selection. Results from his own work on reciprocal altruism and parent/offspring relations indicated that deception was a significant factor in both. In reciprocal altruism deception and the ability to recognize deception is essential to identifying "cheaters" who take the benefit from another organism and don't provide the reciprocal benefit back. Deception also plays a major role in parent/offspring relations. One of Trivers' major discoveries was that the parent/offspring relation, contrary to what one might expect, is often filled with conflict. For example, each child wants to maximize the nurturing from their parents with no regard to fair distribution to other offspring. Parents on the other hand want to distribute resources and nurturing to all children, although often not based on perfect fairness but with their own agendas driven by maximizing reproductive success. Hence, children can often attempt to deceive their parents with cries for attention and pain that exaggerate their actual needs. These and other drivers toward deception result in the participants developing an "arms race" analogous to the kinds of changes seen in biology between predators and their prey. As one group practices and gets ever better at deception those who need to recognize deception get ever better at distinguishing verbal, physical, and other cues. The leads to one of the essential claims of the book, that self deception often results from an organism needing to practice deception. For example, in humans there are many verbal and physical cues that indicate when someone is probably being deceptive. Thus, Trivers asserts (with the details and evidence to come in later chapters) that humans often end up practicing self deception because it is in their self interest to deceive and one of the best ways to deceive others is to deceive yourself, if you convince yourself that the deception is true you will not exhibit the cues that let others recognize deception.

Deception in nature
Although the book focuses on humans, in this chapter Trivers lays the foundation for his model by describing the general nature of the conflict between deceivers and deceived in nature for all organisms. This conflict is an example of a co-evolutionary struggle: genetic improvements that lead to better deception create more pressure for genetic improvements to enable better recognition of deception. He cites examples such as butterflies and snakes which have distinctive markings to warn predators that they are poisonous and mimic species that evolve similar markings even though they are not. He also describes examples of parasite birds that lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. The young mimic the young of the species they replaced and deceive the mother birds into wasting their precious resources caring for children that aren't theirs. In plants several species reproduce via deception, for example they may mimic the smell of other plants that provide nutritional value to various insects and birds and deceive the animals to pollinate them even though they have no such value or the plant may mimic the smell of a female pollinator in order to lure male pollinators toward them.

Neurophisiology
In the next section, Trivers discusses the relevant brain research on the components of his model. The neurophysical research on concepts such as the unconscious vs unconscious mind, memory, intentions, and repression.

Family and sexual interactions
Trivers begins this section by explaining Hamilton's rule for kin selection: $$rB > C$$. This formula defines when an altruistic act toward one's kin is in the interest of the organism that is behaving altruistically. The percentage of genes that the two organisms share is $$r$$ (for relatedness). The benefit to the organism receiving the altruistic act is $$B$$ and the cost to the organism behaving altruistically is $$C$$.

Trivers demonstrates that kin selection does not guarantee that family members will always act altruistically to each other. Even with parents and children (except for some species of insects and micro-organisms) the relatedness is at most 50%. Also, each child is motivated to seek 100% of the potential benefits from their parents where as parents are motivated to spread benefits to all children. In addition, there can be more subtle avenues for potential conflicts even within the individual itself. According to Trivers:

"...relatedness considerations automatically split the organism into multiple selves, with differing interests, ... we used to believe that an organism had a single self-interest. It had a unitary aim—to maximize its genetic reproduction. Kinship theory says this can’t be true. Different genes within us have differing rules of inheritance, and this will give them contradictory interests. For example, the Y chromosome is always passed father to son. ... The Y and the X are only small parts of the whole genome. The main genetic split within us is between our maternal and paternal halves, which are equally strong. There are a few hundred genes in us that are active only if inherited from our mother, so-called maternally active genes, and about an equal number from the father, so-called paternally active ones. Maternally active genes are selected to promote maternal interests and paternally active, paternal. This generates internal genetic conflict in which two separate genetic selves compete for control of our behavior and larger phenotype."

Deception and sex
Trivers describes some of the fundamental biological differences that differentiate the roles human males take to courtship and mating compared to females. Women must invest a far greater amount of their resources on child rearing as dictated by their biology (e.g. breast for nursing). As a result women are the scarce reproductive resource that men compete for. Men are driven to deceive their perspective mates (and hence themselves as well according to Trivers' theory) on areas such as their ability to support offspring, their status within the tribe, their prowess in activities associated with providing such as hunting, and their genetic fitness as exhibited by various physical traits such as symmetrical bodies.

Reception
Richard Dawkins greeted the book with great praise, saying: "This is a remarkable book, by a uniquely brilliant scientist. Robert Trivers has a track record of producing highly original ideas, which have gone on to stimulate much research. His Darwinian theory of self-deception is arguably his most provocative and interesting idea so far. The book is enlivened by Trivers’ candid personal style, and is a pleasure to read. Strongly recommended."

Other reviewers were more moderate. John Horgan in the New York Times was mostly positive in his evaluation of the ideas and evidence that Trivers put forward but said of Trivers' writing style: "Trivers is not an elegant stylist like Dawkins, Wilson or Pinker. His technical explanations can be murky, his political rants cartoonishly crude."