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There are of course species which have evolved to deceive others, for instance by copying markings of more dangerous species, or the whole thing with cuckoo eggs, but this doesn't necessarily involve any conscious intent or knowledge. There's also a lot of deception such as for example animals making themselves look bigger than they are to scare predators or rivals, imitating other animals' calls, even males which disguise as females to evade the surveillance of dominant males. Animals which hide, blend in against the background and effectively "pretend they aren't there"; I've seen cats go under cover and then assume no humans in the room know where they are, suggesting some degree of consciousness of deception.

I don't think lying is present in early childhood proto-language because claim-making is expressive and invocatory (one cries when hungry, in pain, etc). It seems however to enter fairly quickly. I think it might actually evolve from an earlier process of denial in which a child simply refuses to accept an unpleasant reality, posits a hallucinatory or willed reality instead, and verbally insists on the existence of the latter (this would also generate make-believe/play). It later gets attached to self-preservation once parents or other authorities start imposing unpleasant prohibitions or demands. Since these initially have no moral force, and/or are marked with persecutory anxieties, it will seem obviously legitimate to lie in order to avoid detection and/or punishment. This belief will be weakened if the parental commands are later internalised and moralised, though self-deception can also be directed towards such internalised beliefs (ergo "rationalisations", "neutralisations" etc). There are people out there who never lie. Always either autistic or obsessive-compulsive AFAIK. This apparently arises from a particular expressive relation to language (similar to that of a very early infant) in the former case, and a strict superego (possibly imagined to be all-seeing) in the latter. There are also people who compulsively lie, even when it has no clear benefit. This seems to be conditioned on lying being transgressive, and coincides with other types of compulsive/impulsive rulebreaking (in so-called sociopaths): rebellion against a failed and sadistic superego.

I would expect those who consider themselves to be in an antagonistic (warlike, class struggle...) relationship with an adversary to condone lying to the adversary, but also to discourage or limit lying among the group with whom they share the hidden transcript. In some cases there's also a kind of nod-and-wink lying which acknowledges some kind of affinity, like McKenzie's "don't look there" (not itself a lie, but a way of saying: I'm up to something I don't want monitored, remembered or reported, pretend it's not happening).

My heuristic rule is that lies are justified in a situation where force would be justified, and to ward off threats to autonomy. Affinity/intimacy precludes lying; the greater the affinity, the less secrets and lies there should be; if one has to avoid "true" statements because the other can't handle them, the level of affinity is somewhat less, although omission and simplification are also different from lying (and in many cases people will agree to work together on a right-to-know-only basis). Lying to pigs, bosses and the like is fine; so is lying to nosey relatives and suchlike about such matters as being an anarchist, doing drugs, or being gay; so is lying in the course of an undercover action and other actions against an adversary, and lying to get money (or something else one wants/needs) out of cunts (such as banks and governments). Activities such as spoof press releases and poetic terrorism fall under play/poesis rather than lying.