There is one good point that horrible film brings up though - it makes it clear how utterly impossible it would be to build a sustainable human society without lies. This is probably what makes every scene in the movie (aside of poor acting) so very awkward. For example, it is hard to believe one could walk into the bank and ask for a few hundred dollars from a zeroed out account. If the bank employees were so willing to accept the word of one (apparently disgruntled) client, how or why would they have opened a bank? In fact, once you follow this line of logic, it becomes apparent no complex social structure (such as stock market or lottery) could have been created by a group of truth-loving apes. I think part of the reason why we are human has to do with the fact that we can lie, we can imagine the "other" truth, the alternative reality which could have existed and which can and will exist as long as we manage to convince others it does. And then we convince ourselves.
I've long given up on the idea of finding just one, magic change in the development of homo sapience which sparked the rest of it. I don't think such a thing ever existed. We, just like every other animal on this blessed planet, are a product of many small improvements coming together at one particular point in time and space (when stars aligned right) when a perfect storm introduced yet another major change in the framework of evolution. I won't expand on this idea here, it will be covered in a separate post. I am just trying to establish the next paragraphs are not written under the assumption of one, revolutionary change. It was one of the major factors, maybe the biggest contributor, maybe not. But I do think it participated.
We're not unique at lying. We're unique in the level to which we take it. Spiders build complex webs to trap incests, lizards (and others) camouflage their own appearance, dolphins literally mud up the waters and so on. The predictors have long invented the idea of misleading their pray and pray have invented counter-actions to mislead their predators. They both lie in a sense, they intentionally produce the appearance of the reality (for the pray) which is not. Even plants use evolutionary tactics such a trapping insects. This makes me believe the concept isn't necessarily the same as what we refer to when we consider lying. It is more of evolutionary instinct - the sequence of steps following some simple template which tends to succeed at times. In this respect, as Darwin pointed out, there is really no difference in the polar bear's ability to hibernate for 6 month and the bee's ability to build hives. This is different from the human notion of lying. It is just a short-lived pseudo-reality which has a very specific goal (of trapping pray). Humans also used it (lie) for this purpose when hunting (digging trap holes, etc.) but they also use it for other aspects of their existence, particularly for the social ones. Other animals have one set of reality - the reality which is the best reflection of the real their brains can construct. We have several co-existing realities. We take different reflections of the real and construct many different sub-realities in our mind. The sub-realities can parallel each other, can build on each other or exist as two distinct, unrelated mini-worlds. This explains quite simply why humans are so well adapted at assuming roles. No animal has been known to temporarily assume a different role and then fall back to its original role (other than for hunting or defending but we already mentioned it is a an instinct). When a chameleon turns its skin into the color of a leaf it never believes it is a leaf; When a human goes to work and turns into a bus driver, he/she actually believes to be a bus driver - a machine with a singular function of driving other people around. This is the key to our success - the ability to lie gave us the ability to assume roles which itself gave us the two principal characteristics widely believed to be the root cause of our success: the ability to build complex social games and the ability to construct complex tools. I believe these causes themselves stem from the human ability to lie.
What is this ability then? The ability to lie? It can also be called the ability to imagine, probably for a better connotation. How did it evolve? Or why? I don't think it evolved just in humans. It has always been there - the ability to fill in the blanks. When animals are faced with a situation that lacks enough information for them to engage some pre-defined template (e.g. "Run", "Fight", "Call for help", etc.) , they have to fill in the blanks in the partial knowledge of the reality. Their brain basically goes into a freeze mode (see more at: http://cogprints.org/5014/) and then fills in the blanks (randomly?) in order to fit them into one of the templates. We do the same thing most of the time (since we're most of the times still chimps) but we occasionally do something quite interesting - we fill in the blanks in the templates, not in the reality. That is, our brain figures if there's not enough data to decide which template to use, maybe one of them can be altered by (randomly?) filling in the blanks (in the template) so that it matches the reality better and then act accordingly. Again, this is not new to humans. All mammalia invent trick and teach their young. We just took it to a different level, we constantly change the rules of the game and if it fits us, we invent new games. The percentage of "invented" reality in the mind of a fox constitutes a small percent of the foxes' understanding of what the reality is. In our case, the "invented" reality constitutes the majority of what we think the reality is. No wonder we invented religion and not just once.
In short, some strange mutation caused the progenitor Adam and Eve to lie all the time (probably unnecessarily). They were constantly inventing unreal realities, filling in the blanks when it was not needed. They started to experience pleasure in making up the reality. They were essentially delusional. Needless to say such an opportunistic approach would generally produce disastrous results and any individual using it would be quickly eliminated. No doubt this has been tried by other animals but for some reason it worked with human progenitor. Granted, it was not an overnight success, took many small steps and eliminated all the intermediate, gradual species on its way but once fully developed it turned out to be the deadliest survival advantage any living creature has witnessed for the past 3 billion years.
Why it worked in the case of apes is a million dollar question. I think it had something to do with the particular environmental challenges they faced. Maybe the environment was particularly volatile at the time? This would explain why the trait which would make the brain of a particular individual volatile could also survive. Such an extreme volatility would be very rare (drastic changes on the planet are usually unidirectional) and it would probably be even more rare that a large diversity of the most intelligent mammals of the time had to survive through this volatility. It would (and did) kill most of them, require some drastic physiological change in others and finally allow only a few to survive using this questionably strategy of altering survival templates as if there was no tomorrow. How small the chances really were can be clearly shown by the number of species which had to go through it and come out - one. Many struggled, even managed to almost master the technique (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal) but in in the end they all vanished in vain. I believe we're here because we chose to walk on a tight rope while joggling several balls of fire. We gambled but so did every single specie who got this far. We just wen all in and now we get to cover the entire planet in plastic.
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