never went wrong. They came back with the answer that the kingpin had never gone wrong; so Ford ordered it made to an inferior specification to save money. ' Nature, ' wrote Humphrey, ' is surely at least as careful an economist as Henry Ford:'
Intelligence must therefore have a purpose; it cannot be an expensive luxury. Defining intelligence as the ability to ' modify behavior on the basis of valid inference from evidence, ' Humphrey argued that the use of intelligence for practical invention was an easily demolished straw man: ' Paradoxically, subsistence technology, rather than requiring intelligence, may actually become a substi-tute for it: ' The gorilla, Humphrey noted, is intelligent as animals go, yet it leads the most technically undemanding life imaginable.
It eats the leaves that grow abundantly all around it. But the gorilla 's life is dominated by social problems: The vast majority of its intellectual effort is expended on dominating, submitting to, reading the mood of, and affecting the lives of other gorillas: Likewise, Robinson Crusoe 's life on the desert island was technically fairly straightforward, says Humphrey. ' It was the arrival of Man Friday on the scene that really made things difficult for Crusoe. ' Humphrey suggested that mankind uses his intellect mainly in social situations. 'The game of social plot and counter-plot cannot be played merely on the basis of accumulated knowledge, any more than a game of chess can. ' A person must calculate the consequences of his own behavior and calculate the likely behavior of others: For that he needs at least a glimpse of his own motives in order to guess the things that are going through others '
minds in similar situations, and it was this need for self-knowledge that drove the increase in conscious awareness.'
As Horace Barlow of Cambridge University has pointed out, the things of which we are conscious are mostly the mental events that concern social actions: We remain unconscious of how we see, walk, hit a tennis ball, or write a word: Like a military hierarchy, consciousness operates on a ' need to know ' policy: 'I can think of no exception to the rule that one is conscious of what it is possible to report to others and not conscious of what it is not
possible to report.' John Crook, a psychologist with a special interest in Eastern philosophy, has made much the same point:
'Attention therefore moves cognition into awareness, where it becomes subject to verbal formulation and reporting to others.'
What Humphrey and Alexander described was essentially a Red Queen chess game: The faster mankind ran— the more intelligent he became—the more he stayed in the same place because the people over whom he sought psychological dominion were his own relatives, the descendants of the more intelligent people from previous generations: As Pinker and Bloom put it, 'Interacting with an organism of approximately equal mental abilities whose motives are at times outright [sic] malevolent makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition: '13 If Tooby and Cosmides are right about mental modules, among the modules that were selected to increase in size by this intellectual chess tournament was the ' theory of mind ' module,, the one that enables us to form an opinion about one another 's thoughts, together with the means to express our own thoughts through the language modules.' There is plenty of good evidence for this idea when you look about you: Gossip is one of the most universal of human habits. No conversation between people who know each other well—fellow employees, fellow family members, old friends—ever lingers for long on any topic other than the behavior, ambitions, motives, frailties, and affairs of other absent—or present—members of the group: That is the reason the soap opera is the quintessentially effective way to entertain people:' Nor is this a Western habit: Konner wrote of his experience with !Kung San tribesmen:
After two years with the San,
THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME
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Virtually all novels and plays are about the same subject, even when disguised as history or adventure. If you want to understand human motives, read Proust or Trollope or Tom Wolfe, not Freud or Piaget or Skinner. We are obsessed with one another 's minds: 'Our intuitive commonsense psychology far surpasses any scientific psychology in scope and accuracy, ' wrote Don Symons.'9
Horace Barlow points out that great literary minds are, almost by definition, great mind-reading minds: Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim: We are clever because we are—and to the extent that we are—natural psychologists:`°
Indeed, novelists themselves saw this first. In George Eliot 's
Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chess-men had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little.uncertain also about your own:.:: You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with con-tempt: Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game a man has to play against his fellowmen with other fellowmen for instruments:
The Alexander-Humphrey theory, which is widely known as the Machiavellian hypothesis,' sounds rather obvious, but it could never have been proposed in the 1960s before the 'selfish ' revolution in the study of behavior or by anybody steeped in the ways of social science, for it requires a cynical view of animal communication. Until the mid 1970s zoologists thought of communication in terms of information transfer: It was in the interests of both the communicator and the recipient that the message be clear, honest, and informative. But as Lord Macaulay put it,'Z 'The object of oratory alone is not truth but persuasion: ' In 1978, Richard Dawkins and John Krebs pointed out that animals use communication prin-
cipally to manipulate one another rather than to transfer information: A bird sings long and eloquently to persuade a female to mate with him or a rival to keep clear of his territory: If he were merely passing on information, he need not make the song so elaborate: Animal communication, said Dawkins and Krebs, is more like human advertising than like airline timetables: Even the most mutually beneficial communication, like that between a mother and a baby, is pure manipulation, as every mother who has been woken in the night by a desperate- sounding infant who merely wants company knows: Once scientists had begun thinking in this way, they looked at animal social life in an entirely new light.'
One of the most striking pieces of evidence for deception 's role in communication comes from experiments
