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Two musicians witness a mob hit. Fearful for their lives, they hide by disguising themselves as women in an all-female band. That's the secret-life plot for the classic film Some Like It Hot (1959 ), starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon. It was listed by the American Film Institute as the "greatest American comedy film of all time."
This is a story of love and deceit--deceit of the sartorial kind, as two decidedly heterosexual men play at being innocent women in order to avoid being discovered by violent men. Deceit of any sort, of course, requires a background of honest communication. In this case honest communication means standard dress styles and the cues of bodily appearance that enable each sex to recognize who is the same and who is the other. Clothes, sex, and the steamy presence of Marilyn Monroe make this a highly entertaining conceit: transvestitism as an erotically-charged form of deceit.
Since transvestitism requires vestments--clothes--can we ever expect to find this particular kind of secret life outside the human arena? A bigger question: Is deceit of any sort possible outside the human arena? The answer for both is an emphatic yes. Even at the simplest levels, the use of an honest communication is likely to provoke a deceitful alternative. Take the Augrabies flat lizards, for instance.
These remarkable reptiles live in world-class abundance around cliffs that line the banks of the Orange River at Augrabies Falls National Park in South Africa. They're dramatic little creatures. They'll zip headlong down a 100 meter-high vertical rockface, and, in pursuit of insects, they do backflips. They're also adapted to living in the rock crevices so common in this particular place. The females lay their two yearly eggs down in a crevice during the height of summer; and both sexes sleep in those same inaccessible recesses, their tails wrapped around their bodies for protection from both cold and predators.
Their social world converges on the source of their most important food: black flies. These nutritious insects rise in swarming plumes at certain auspicious spots along the river's edge. Being territorial animals, the lizards vie for the better plots of real estate, which, of course, are located along the river at those spots where the black fly plumes appear. The better territories are taken by the bigger and more vigorous adult males, each competing with the other adult males in order to claim and maintain that valuable real estate. Naturally, possessing superior real estate not only translates into nutritional benefits; it also means reproductive benefits. While the resident male chases away the other males, the observant females eagerly crowd in, always interested in those places where the black fly plumes abound.
Good food equals good territory. Vigorous males get better territory. Females choose better territories and the vigorous males who own them. Nothing surprising here. This is an ordinary, predictable, and stable social arrangement.
Adding to the stability is the fact that the males, once they reach full adulthood, begin to take on their coat of many colors: a brilliant wash of yellow, orange, green, and various shades of blue. The adult males, already significantly larger than the adult females, thereby stand out with great vividness--like a flag--and indeed we should think of their vivid coloration as a visual communication. It communicates to the females: Here is a powerful male who is likely to have claimed good territory. And since the larger and more aggressive males--that is, the better fighters--actually have brighter coloring, their colors also allow the males to identify who is more likely to win a fight. Thus, the coloration also has the effect of reducing actual fighting. The critical areas are located on the abdomen in patches of bright orange or yellow, and the males use their abdominal skin patches like badges of rank. Two males square off, flash their abdomens patches at each other, and if one can show he clearly outranks the other, that settles it. No need to fight.
This is an example of honest communication, and it provides some obvious benefits, but it also comes at a real cost. Overhead, high above the rocky ledges and cliffs and all those wriggling, squabbling, mating, black-fly-eating reptiles there turns and turns a predatory bird, the kestrel, just looking for a good lizard to eat. You would think that during the millions of lizard generations this sort of thing has been going on, natural selection would have produced increasingly hard-to-see lizards: ones camouflaged to look just like the rough and splintered rocks on which they congregate. In fact, that very thing has happened. The females and the immatures of both sexes are colored a dull brown with a pattern of dark and light stripes on their backs that resembles the pattern of little rock crevices. That makes perfect sense. But we can also imagine that the adult males have abandoned that sense in favor of another sense: one that very strongly values the communication they give to both other males and to females.
A good bright skin makes other males back off, and it makes females move in. That's its value. The cost of this coat of many colors, this flag or visual communication, is what keeps it honest, since any male lizards wrapped in such a vivid skin are defying the predatory intent of that overhead kestrel. Vividness is an honest communication of vigor, and so we can see that the system has developed its own natural barrier against deceit.
Deceit happens anyhow.
Since the juveniles of both sexes maintain the same dull, rock-like coloring, the maturing of males is accompanied by a gradual development of bright colors. Such young adults are still not big or self-confident enough to hold their own, and they are thus vulnerable to attack from fully-matured males. Since they can't seriously compete for territory, they have no good way to attract females. Too bad for them. It happens, however, that a certain proportion of these young males reach sexual maturity before they acquire the full coloring that identifies a mature male. They still look like females, and they use this temporary and circumstantial disguise--a male dressed in female clothing, as it were--to their own advantage. While the big, brilliant, vigorous male is standing in the middle of his glorious real estate, observing the lovely plume of swarming black files and surveying all the attractive females assembled there in huge numbers, he is also watching out for any intruder males. Any intruder he sees, he will do his best to chase and bite, chase and bite, until the intruder retreats. The younger male who still looks like a female, however, may very well be able to avoid such an unpleasant confrontation. He may simply be able to settle himself inconspicuously in the midst of a seething crowd of real females. If he's lucky, he'll now have plenty of opportunities to mate right inside the territory of the guarding resident male.
The resident male may be entirely fooled by such a visual deceit. But then there's the olfactory problem, caused by pheromones. Male lizards smell different from females, and the resident male is likely to go around sniffing, which he does by licking with his tongue. This means that the young male enjoying his secret life, looking like a female yet still smelling like a male, has to remain on guard. When he sees the resident male approaching, he will move away, keeping always a few steps ahead of the probing tongue, careful always to avoid having his secret life uncovered by a flickering lick.
It's an odd story, isn't it. But does this strange case of animal deceit have any resemblance whatsoever to our own human experience of deceit?
In some important ways, yes, I believe it does. For one thing, since all deceits challenge a social norm of honesty, all deceits have in common the possibility of rule enforcement. Creating trouble. Getting caught. Being punished. It is not hard to imagine that the deceitful male Augrabies flat lizards are motivated to avoid the physically and socially powerful resident male's probing tongue through a fear of being caught and punished. Among people, it may also be the fear of getting caught in a deceit that, either because of the likely shame or the likely punishment, makes our heart race, our respiration spike, and our sweat glands work overtime: all physiological changes that the standard polygraph test is designed to assess. Indeed, such events associated with general anxiety are predictable enough that a new generation of technologies is being developed to refine lie detection. Thermal-imaging devices, for example, may soon enough be deployed in airport security barriers to detect the minor temperature elevations (as little as half a degree Fahrenheit) that result from an increased blood flowing into tiny capillaries around the liar's eyes.
This post includes material from my recent book, The Moral Lives of Animals.
