AN EVEN EARLIER TIME: NATURE

Come with me, trust me. I won’t deceive you. Most likely, until now, you’ve been led to believe that lying is something that happens only among our kind, among man- and woman-kind. Perhaps your definition of truth has, roughly, been to do with adapting between what is and what is claimed to be – that is, with an adaptation between reality and thought. And, therefore, it might seem that the truth depends solely on the intervention of the human intellect, which comes into play only with us. At this point, however, we might ask ourselves: so does nature not lie?

Let’s go back to the beginning of the world. We don’t need to go as far back as the beginning of time, nor even to the period when the planet was forming. It’s enough for us to pause in that moment when things began to take the shape we now know, just before the arrival of human beings. Already around us are the forests, rivers, the high mountains and, in the background, the sea, and in them practically all the known animals. Except for us. But let’s look a little more closely. Isn’t that thing hiding among the branches above a bird that’s the exact same colour as the leaves? Don’t the feathers of that owl also have the same shape and texture as the rough bark of that tree trunk? Who are they trying to deceive? Their predators, no doubt. And yet, what about that cheetah crouching in the dry grass, with its spots and its straw-coloured fur? Isn’t it also using camouflage to fool its prey? Now, let’s move away – slowly – mustn’t draw attention. Let’s go and hunker down on the riverbank, amidst the silence of the world’s faint far-off beginnings. Wait. Even here, even in the water, you and I alike have real difficulty picking out those fish on the rocky riverbed, given how faithfully the scales on their backs mimic the shapes of the stones in the water below. And, if we could dive down and somehow get ourselves underneath the fish, we still wouldn’t be able to see them, because, as would then become clear, their bellies are just the right colours to blend in with the bright sky above.

The most famous case of crypsis (from kryptos, ‘cryptic’, ‘hidden’) is perhaps that of the chameleon, which as everyone must know can change skin colour according to circumstance. Despite this, its fame is somewhat undeserved, its transformation not being so complete, nor its control over it so absolute. We would only need to walk around the place where we currently are to discover far more sophisticated specimens: we need look no further than the cuttlefish, which not only changes colour in a matter of seconds, but is at the same time capable of modifying its texture, the entirety of its external structure, and even of generating patterns similar to the shifting seabed which it can then set in motion along its body in the opposite direction to that in which it is actually moving. And not all such strategies are visual. Further on, in that reef over there, its cousins the squids indeed shoot out ink jets to hide themselves, but first and foremost they deceive their natural enemies with the chemistry of their smells.

On the other hand, in addition to all these animals that seek to resemble their environment, everywhere around us we can find abundant examples of mimesis (from mimos, ‘imitation’) in animals trying to look like others, whether those others be dangerous, harmless or repugnant. Like the flies that pretend to be bees, or the snakes that take on the gentle shapes of the coral, or those owls that nest among the rocks and, to protect their eggs, make a sound identical to that of a rattlesnake. And, now that we look closely, the owl that we thought we saw pretending to be part of a tree trunk wasn’t in fact even a bird, but rather an owl butterfly with wings outspread, mimicking with astonishing precision the face of an owl. Each of this butterfly’s wings shows a marvellous ocellus, or eye-like marking, large and round, of a vivid yellow with black dilated pupils inside. To the point that, in this moment, even though she has concerns entirely her own, we could swear that the non-existent owl is holding our gaze. Such ocelli are not, of course, only found among prey animals like butterflies and fish. Even tigers have the trompe l’oeil of an eye outlined on the backs of their ears, in the form of white spots that ward off any attacks from behind.

So, the primeval forest is full of deception.

And, although I’ve brought you here, at such an untimely hour, maybe you didn’t even need to leave your house. Perhaps you could have just observed your pet cat for a few minutes – which is currently motionless, crouched, ready to pounce, and thinks it’s in with a chance of catching the sparrow pecking about on the other side of the glass. Doesn’t any animal dissemble just by crouching down in this way? Doesn’t it try to make others believe that it isn’t in the place where it in fact is? Crouching down is always a kind of dissembling; that goes for the victim paralysed by fear, too. But what if you tried to surprise the little hunter by suddenly leaping over to it like a mad person, waving your arms in the air, and getting it to bare its teeth, to hiss at you, fur bristling – wouldn’t you say your cat is then pretending to be bigger than it really is? Its arched spine and upstanding fur, would they not again be a form of deception?

All of which means that lying was already there in nature, long before language arose, long before we showed up. You, me or any of our kind.

Imagine the uncertainty of the first primate that found itself plunged into a dream. How perplexed they would have been upon waking. What bewilderment to be suddenly pulled out of that other story, out of that other apparently meaningful reality with all its many images, and to discover oneself back in the cave again, alone, frozen stiff, and the white rabbit they had just caught gone, and their parents, long dead, also now gone. What are dreams but one more huge lie?

What about sex? One of the greatest natural deceptions in the world, and one that cuts from the jungle to the fundamental centre of human society, and still governs our lives today, no matter how aware we may become of our instincts and biological patterns. And it is even greater because it is a double lie. On the one hand, sex deceives us through attraction, making us believe that those legs, that back or that neck are more appealing than the hairy hindquarters of a deer and the sweet musky smell secreted by its glands. Making us think that we are the ones who freely choose one person over another – that tummy, that chest or those ankles, over the swollen, almost exploding belly of the frigate bird, whose intense red colour is irresistible to the females of its species. And then there is the fact that sex deceives us through the illusion of descent. Parents are prey to the illusion that they will be reproduced in their children, who will supposedly be a copy of them, a continuity of their own being, a step towards immortality. But this false promise is a yet another of nature’s ruses. Subjects do not reproduce, only species do. Individuals are nothing more than vehicles for genetic code.

Sexual attraction and the need to reproduce, therefore, are deceptions long before the formation of societies. Long before the appearance of the sophisticated idea of love, too, to which I’ll have to dedicate a special section later. In the same way that the first lies pre-date language. Even the first conscious lies, those born of shrewd intention – those that have their origin in an intelligent mind, in the capacity to project the future and anticipate what is going to happen – are anterior to language. At some moment in the remote past, for the first time a primate had to emit a cry of alarm that was not genuine. Although it had never happened before, there must have been a specific morning, or perhaps a noontime, when it first occurred to a capuchin monkey to warn of the arrival of a predator with high-pitched screeches and hopping around – but this time not in order to save its companions, but rather to make them all run off, so that it could have the crab it had seen approaching in the grass all to itself. The first semantic lie.

Millions of years later, of course, language as we know it would emerge and lies could then become far more complex and refined, giving rise to art, religions, science and the whole of contemporary culture.

However, attentive reader, I would like you to have noticed not only that there are lies that pre-date human beings, but also that they are above the level of the individual. It is not one owl in particular that chooses to adopt a plumage similar to the tree trunks, nor a single cheetah that decides to turn yellow in the savannah. Even a certain chameleon or a certain cuttlefish does not get to choose. It is in the species and not in individuals that the lie resides. It is in nature, in its higher plan, in its inextricable desire for permanence and evolution in some direction, that the will to mislead is embedded. Counterfeiting, manipulation and deception do not require the trifling will of beings endowed with intelligence. The orchid mimics female bees with its labellum, not only imitating their shape, but also replicating their pheromone production, in order that the drones will pollinate it. And it doesn’t even have a nervous system.

I assured you that I was not going to deceive you, that...