Nature is rife with cheating. Possums play possum, feigning death to cheat predators. Crows cry wolf to scare off rivals. Amphibians and reptiles are inveterate impostors. Even genes and cells cheat. 

Lixing Sun’s The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars explores the evolution of cheating in the natural world, revealing how dishonesty has given rise to wondrous diversity.

Blending cutting-edge science with a wealth of illuminating examples — from microscopic organisms to highly intelligent birds and mammals — Lixing Sun shows how cheating in nature relies on two basic rules. One is lying, by which cheaters exploit honest messages in communication signals and use them to serve their own interests. The other is deceiving, by which cheaters exploit the biases and loopholes in the sensory systems of other creatures. Sun demonstrates that cheating serves as a potent catalyst in the evolutionary arms race between the cheating and the cheated, resulting in a biological world teeming with complexity and beauty.

Lixing Sun, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Research Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences in Central Washington University. He is the author of The Fairness Instinct: The Robin Hood Mentality and Our Biological Nature and coauthor of The Beaver: Natural History of a Wetlands Engineer. The latter won Choice magazine’s Outstanding Academic Title award and was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal for excellence in nature writing. He is also a coeditor of The Behavioral Ecology of the Tibetan Macaque.

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