Cheaters by nature | The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars: Cheating and Deception in the Living World, Lixing Sun, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ; 2023), ISBN: 978-0-691-19860-6

Many of us are familiar with the concept of a ‘cheat’, a dishonest person making gains by breaking the rules. But how familiar are we with the breadth and frequency of cheaters throughout the natural world? Cheating, deception, and lying are behaviors commonly seen in the natural world, and are frequently the result of nature over nurture. In fact, many individuals cheat throughout the animal, bacterial, and fungal kingdoms, and cheating is observed even at the level of genes and chromosomes. In the natural world, where survival of the fittest dictates who survives, individuals evolve a variety of mechanisms to survive and reproduce, and dishonesty can be a successful strategy. In a new book The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars: Cheating and Deception in the Living World, Lixing Sun tells the tale of these dishonest individuals and their unique means of increasing their own personal fitness by sharing storiesfrom his personal research on animal behavior, as well as citing examples of cheating in popular human culture.