EARTHWORMS DON'T LIE

As a kid on the western Kentucky farm back in the 1950s, I liked nothing more than going fishing, usually in the little pond next to the barn. When I got old enough to bait my own hook and saw how an earthworm -- we called them fishingworms -- had to be impaled, and how it squirmed and shuddered, I got upset. My parents told me that worms don't feel, so with relief I believed them, and started baiting my own hooks with earthworms I dug myself.

Years passed and then years later one day my brain's neurons reached a certain threshold of interconnectivity, and suddenly I knew that my worms' writhing and struggling meant that earthworms do hurt when you push a hook through them. Moreover, hooks hurt fish mouths, and when you're removing a swallowed hook and the fish alternately violently twists its body and goes stiff, just like some people do when the dentist gets close to a nerve, they suffer unimaginably.

My parents had not told the truth, maybe because they believed the lie themselves, or maybe they figured that the good times our family enjoyed fishing together shouldn't be spoiled by my anxiety about worms and fish being hurt, or maybe it was something else. Whatever the case, on the day my brain's neurons reached that threshold, that was my introduction to the fact that authority figures, even loved and well-meaning ones, can lie.

Soon I saw little white lies and big lies all around and more or less got used to them. But then in highschool maybe another neuron threshold was reached, for suddenly one day when I saw TV images of US jets napalming small, rural Vietnamese villages -- and our troops were supposed to be fighting for freedom and democracy there -- I recognized a whole new kind of lie. They were lies that society's institutions tell. At the same time the war was going on, also I heard many religious folks saying viscous things about Martin Luther King and other leaders struggling for Black equality. All this, to me, was like napalming the roots of a tree, my own roots.

So, while still young, I was initiated into the reality of a world awash with lies. In recent years I've become aware of yet a third level of lying, and that's the lies that Nature tells us. She tells us her lies in the information encoded in our genetic makeups, information that manifests as human predispositions.

For example, She tells us that the best food is sweet and fatty, so we crave candy and pizzas more than carrots and tofu. Back when our distant ancestors were scouring the savanna for just anything to eat, such predispositions were helpful, were adaptive, but, not now, not with us. Nature tells us it's good to have sex with folks who turn us on, irregardless of whether a population needs more babies. She predisposes us to be patriotic, and proud of those who look like ourselves, even when leaders manipulate patriotism and racial pride for their own benefit.

Nature lies to other living things, too, not just humans. Being camouflaged is a form of lying, of saying you're not there when you are, and when an orchid flower looks like a prospective mate to a certain insect, that's lying, too.

In fact, I'm thinking that if lying is such a commonplace feature of Nature -- and humans and human thought and feeling are part of Nature -- that it must be important. Lying must be a mechanism important to the evolutionary process.

Lying must be adaptive in an evolutionary sense because at the species level it weeds out those individuals not smart and alert enough to see through the lies, thus making it less likely that the dumber and most unwary among us pass along their genes. If Nature's lie about sweets and fatty foods isn't recognized for what it is, you're more likely to die from a heart attack.

Lying also serves its purpose at higher levels. For example, if any nation reaches the point where it democratically elects a leader on the basis of provable lies, then that benighted country -- no matter how strong and influential it once was -- will pursue policies that ultimately weaken it and then destroy it.

And then humanity's evolution can proceed to higher levels without it.