[CarpetBench]

> We didn't consider lying and cheating to be frowned upon until we decided we were a civilized society with rules based on

Eh, what? Where are you getting that from? Any organism with cooperative dynamics also has to contend with cheaters, and yet cooperation is extremely prevalent in nature. There's a reason parasitism isn't considered the norm in the animal kingdom.

I sincerely doubt that primitive human tribes widely tolerated healthy adults who contributed absolutely nothing to the group.

[chrsstrm]

  > I sincerely doubt that primitive human tribes widely tolerated healthy adults who contributed absolutely nothing to the group.    

It's certainly not hard to imagine that no, they would not have tolerated such behavior. But does this mean that you are suggesting the members of this tribe convened and decided to put rules in place to define a member's behavior and potentially institute punishment if these rules were broken? That sounds suspiciously like a society. It's almost as if the larger population felt that attempting to hinder a particular perceived flaw in human nature was a net positive for the group as a whole.

The existence of cooperation or the desire to cooperate does not disprove that cheating and lying are embedded instincts in living beings. Cheating and cooperation are not mutually exclusive concepts. The parent comment was suggesting that we are somehow evolving to lie and cheat and I'm suggesting that we have been more than capable of this behavior all along. In fact, I've gone so far as to say that not only were we immediately capable since the dawn of humankind, but we have actively suppressed these "survival skills" because they are deemed bad qualities.

[CarpetBench]

> But does this mean that you are suggesting the members of this tribe convened and decided to put rules in place to define a member's behavior and potentially institute punishment if these rules were broken?

No, although I could trivially say that any group of humans living together will be a society in some respect (and thus "natural" human behavior involves being in a society anyway).

Ignoring that, though, removing cheaters doesn't need to involve any sort of centralized group decision making. Your immune system doesn't convene and decide what kind of foreign bodies are unacceptable, and it's largely effective at what it does.

> ...does not disprove that cheating and lying are embedded instincts in living beings.

Sorry, the burden here is on you to prove that cheating and lying are embedded instincts (which I'm assuming means "typical in primitive humans" here). You're the one who made an affirmative statement.

My counterpoint is that cooperation is plentiful in nature (with many examples of cooperation in comparison to parasitism) and thus cheating is unlikely to be typical behavior in the wild.

You need to prove otherwise.

> Cheating and cooperation are not mutually exclusive concepts.

Are we defining cheating differently? What's your definition of cheating?

> The parent comment was suggesting that we are somehow evolving to lie and cheat and I'm suggesting that we have been more than capable of this behavior all along.

Humans are capable of any type of behavior. If your definition of "embedded behavior" is "humans are capable of doing that," then sure, it's trivially true because humans are numerous and any type of behavior can be found with such a large population.

> but we have actively suppressed these "survival skills" because they are deemed bad qualities.

Right, and my argument is that they're primarily suppressed because they're inferior survival skills in aggregate. Cheating and lying are classic "tragedy of the commons" behavior.