Can Nature Lie?
Analyzing animals to better understand Homo sapiens has become a sub-genre in the field of science writing. Sometimes this works well, as when Sabrina Imbler uses a purple octopus, starving to death while incubating her eggs, as a metaphor for disordered eating in How Far the Light Reaches. But other times, the enterprise feels downright Procrustean: An author amasses a wide swath of animal activities, even down to the level of the cell, and describes them in ways that might give the impression that some human quality has an analogue out there in the biosphere.
The compression is most strained when the activity being explained is complex and quintessentially human, such as deception. This makes the enterprise of writing , a recent book by Lixing Sun, especially difficult. Sun, a professor of
