The role of the lie in the evolution of human language Daniel Dor Department of Communication, Tel Aviv University, Israel article info Article history: Available online 8 February 2017 Keywords: Autism Co-evolution Communication Co-operation Deception Human evolution Imagination Language Language evolution Lie-detection Lying Mimesis The handicap principle The social brain hypothesis Variability abstract The literature on language evolution treats the fact that language allows for lying as a major obstacle to the emergence and development of language, and thus looks for theoretical means to constrain the lie. In this paper, I claim that this general formulation of the issue at hand misses out on the fact that lying made an enormous contribution to the evolution of language. Without the lie, language would not be as complex as it is, linguistic communication would be much simpler, the cognitive requirement of language would not be so heavy, and its role in society would be radically different. The argument is based on Dor’s (2015) theory of language as a social communication technology, collectively-designed for the instruction of imagination. The theory re-thinks the essence of lying, and suggests that the emergence of language did more to enhance the human capacity for deception than it did to enhance the human capacity for honest communi- cation. Lying, then, could not be constrained, but language did not collapse. The conception of lying as a threat to language, as it is formulated in the literature, is based on a series of unrealistic assumptions. Most importantly, the cognitive, emotional and social capacities required for lying, lie-detection and moral enforcement are never equally spread within communities: they are highly variable. Lying and language came to be entangled in a never-ending co-evolutionary spiral, which changed the map of commu- nicative relationships within communities, and participated in shaping our languages, societies, cognitions and emotions. We evolved for lying, and because of lying, just as much as we evolved for and because of honest communication. Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The literature on language evolution treats the fact that language allows for lying as a fundamental obstacle to the emergence and stabilization of language itself, and thus looks for theoretical means to reduce the interference of lying in the evolution of language to minimal levels. The underlying argument is based on a set of foundational conceptions from evolutionary theory, having to do with the conditions under which honest signaling (and other types of co-operative behavior) could emerge and stabilize in the biological world (Trivers, 1971; Krebs and Dawkins, 1984; Gintis, 2000): every system of honest communication also allows for cheating, which from the point of view of natural selection seems to be a more ad- vantageous strategy than honest communication; other things being equal, selfish cheaters (free-riders) raise their gains at the expense of their co-operative interlocutors, and thus increase their reproductive success; other things being equal, then, we should thus expect communicators to cheat, but that would immediately cause the collapse of the entire communication system; for honest communication to be evolutionarily stable, additional assumptions concerning the interactions between E-mail address: danield@post.tau.ac.il. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Language Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2017.01.001 0388-0001/Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Language Sciences 63 (2017) 44–59