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Tropical Research at the New York Zoologi-cal Society, had collected and identified crea-tures of the jungle; now he wanted to do thesame with those of the ocean. Beebe had thecred, but Barton—who, after getting no re-sponse to his letters to Beebe, insinuated him-self into the zoologist’s presence one late De-cember day in 1928—had the blueprint.

Daydreaming through engineering classes,Barton had come up with a design for a steelsphere thick enough to resist water pressure atgreat depths. Of course, it would need win-dows of some kind, an oxygen system, tele-phone contact, a spotlight, and a cable andwinch to lower and raise it. To sweat the de-tails, Barton hired the eminent shipbuildingfirm of Cox and Stevens, which, after muchtrial, error, and subcontracting, turned over a fin-ished product. In 1930, Barton carried it bytugboat to Nonsuch Island, Bermuda, wherethe Zoological Society staffed a research sta-tion. There Beebe waited on the R e a d y, a tugrefitted with two winches to handle the three-ton cable.

Beebe christened the four-and-a-half-footglobe the “Bathysphere,” using the Greek pre-fix for d e e p, and without further ceremony theReady, towed by a barge, headed for deepwater. Beebe and Barton squeezed inside thesphere and waited for the hatch cover to betightened. Hampered by the forced intimacy,they watched through a tiny porthole as theBathysphere lurched downward and the mul-ticolored world darkened to a purplish blue. At

800 feet, Beebe began seeing whathe’d been hoping for: weird, fierce,luminescent sea creatures no onehad seen before. But a small leak andother glitches dictated a speedy end tothe Bathysphere’s maiden voyage.

Barton and Beebe continued todive together intermittently for thenext four years, with Beebe cata-loging marine life in the deep andBarton attempting to film it. Yetnever did collaboration evoke so littlegratitude on either side. Beebe cameto view Barton as a whiny dilettante;Barton saw Beebe as a publicity-hogging egotist. Shortly after a his-toric half-mile dive in 1934, the twomen parted company and neverspoke again. Barton made a movie

from his amateur underwater footage, T i t a n sof the Deep, which flopped. He roamed theglobe for another 60 years, backed by his trustytrust fund. Beebe left the ocean, frustrated byaccusations that he hadn’t really discoveredany new deep-sea creatures, and went back tohis beloved jungle.

Brad Matsen, an expert on marine and en-vironmental topics who produced the Nation-al Geographic ocean series The Shape of Life,writes engagingly about the technical and sci-entific contributions of Barton and Beebe, aswell as their personalities—and egos. Thecourage of these two explorers revealed theocean floor, yet the terror of descent taught a larg-er truth as well: No man can conquer the sea.

—A. J. Loftin

WHY WE LIE: The Evolutionary Roots of Deceptionand the Unconscious Mind. By David Livingstone Smith.St. Martin’s Press. 238 pp. $24.95

DECEPTION AT WORK:Investigating and Countering Liesand Fraud Strategies.By Michael J. Comer andTimothy E. Stephens.Gower Publishing. 459 pp. $185

Whatever is alive is at peril. Whatever isalive must compete for food and a matewhile protecting itself against predators.

William Beebe (left) and Otis Barton show off theirbathysphere in Bermuda after their record dive in 1934.

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Mendacity proves helpful in all three en-deavors. But when lying occurs within thetribe, it weakens communal bonds andthreatens the tribe’s survival. That’s why itmust be punished by relentless prosecu-tors seeking perjury convictions.

Outside the tribe, lying remains theweapon of choice. Millions are spent oncamouflage, false clues, misinformation,and double agents. We come by our talentfor lying by evolutionary prescription. Ouranimal lineage reveals a densely wovenfabric of trickery and dissimulation. HenryW. Bates, the Victorian naturalist, noticedthat a butterfly with poor defenses againstpredators would imitate the coloration andmovements of a nasty bully of a butterfly,one with better defenses. Similarly, theNorth American hognose, a nonpoisonoussnake, takes on the coloration and appear-ance of a cobra when attacked and hisses vi-olently, pretending to strike.

“If someone tells you he always tells thetruth, you know you have a liar on yourhands,” Groucho Marx once said. In W h yWe Lie, David Livingstone Smith, a pro-fessor of philosophy at the University ofNew England, observes that we have in-herited from our evolutionary ancestorsnot only the need to be able to lie con-vincingly, but also the need to detect oth-ers’ lies. Better detection skills create theneed for better liars. The result is a never-ending evolutionary arms race.

We all believe we have a lie detector be-tween our ears. Judges commonly tell jurorsto consider witnesses’ demeanor in evalu-ating credibility. Did the witness appear tobe telling the truth? Many studies, howev-er, indicate that body language and man-ner of speech are poor guides for evaluat-ing truthfulness. The scientific evidence,such as it is, suggests that judges who givethe standard instruction are really mis-leading the jury.

Long before Darwin, the common lawtreated lying as inherent in human nature.The law prohibited litigants from takingthe oath and testifying. It was presumedthat they would lie. Even a defendantcharged with first-degree murder, on trialfor his life, couldn’t testify. The religiousview was that he had probably already

committed one crime and shouldn’t betempted to compound his Judgment Dayproblems by committing perjury. Englandbegan allowing defendants to testify in1885. Marshall Hall, a prominent crimi-nal defense barrister, had lobbied for thechange in the law, but he came to regret hissuccess. Under the earlier rule, the de-fense counsel could suggest to the jurywhat the defendant would have said if onlyhis lips weren’t sealed. Hall found that de-fendants’ own stories were far less persua-sive than his versions.

The CIA and other government agen-cies use the polygraph to catch liars, butmost courts reject it. Judges believe thereis too much subjectivity in interpreting theresults. What if a device c o u l d detect false-hood with the scientific accuracy of DNAevidence? It would place great power inthe hands of the enforcer, and inducegreat apprehension on the part of the en-forcee. One’s entire life would be at thedisposal of the person with the truth ma-chine. Would we want this?

Smith worries about self-deception,“the handmaiden of deceit.” It helped us as-cend the evolutionary ladder, he argues,but “it is no longer such a good option ina world stocked with nuclear and biologi-cal weapons. The problem is, we are stuckwith it.”

Deception at Work is a compilation ofevery known technique, fair and foul, forcatching liars and getting them to confess.One recommendation is to lie to the sus-pect: Tell him his partner has confessed,or his fingerprints give him away. Thebook identifies two principal types of lies.The achievement lie, which is told to geta job or to defraud someone, often con-cerns the future, whereas the exculpatorylie seeks to conceal past wrongdoing. AlgerHiss, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clintonwanted to conceal what they had done, sothey lied. Perjury cases are predicated onlies about the past.

All of us are playing the game of “as if,”described by Hans Vaihinger in The Phi-losophy of “As If” (1924). We act as if thisillusory world of the senses were in fact re-ality. We act as if we had free will andwere responsible for what we do. We make

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plans as if we were not under a death sen-tence. It is by these fictions—shall we say,these lies—that we stride confidently intothe future.

—Jacob Stein

BIG COTTON: How a Humble Fiber CreatedFortunes, Wrecked Civilizations, andPut America on the Map. By Stephen Yafa. Viking. 398 pp.$ 2 5 . 9 5

In his 14th-century bestseller V o y a g eand Travels, the English knight Sir JohnMandeville described a half-animal, half-plant he called the “Vegetable Lamb.”Each pod on this amazing Scythian shrub,he wrote, contained a tiny lamb, and lintfrom the animals could be harvested andspun into a light fabric. For many Euro-peans, this fanciful account representedthe first encounter with cotton, a crop thatwould transform their clothing, theirworking lives, and their place in the polit-ical world.

In Big Cotton, journalist Stephen Yafatraces the history of the plant and its prod-ucts, beginning with the near-simultane-ous domestication of wild cotton in Africa,South America, India, and Mexico around3500 b . c . Cotton fabric woven in Indiawas a luxury in ancientGreece and Rome, andin the 1660s a craze forIndian cotton chintz in-fected central and north-ern Europe. The popu-larity of the fabric helpeddrive the English inva-sion of India; the colo-nial government prompt-ly outlawed the Indianmanufacture of cottonfabric, requiring insteadthat raw domestic cottonbe shipped to Englishmills. “By deprivingIndia of the fruits of itsown labor,” Yafa writes,“England all but guaran-teed that the crop wouldone day come to symbol-

ize colonial subjugation and provide a ral-lying point against it.”

The overwhelming demand for cottongoods in Europe also spurred the develop-ment of the first factory system and, in thewords of one contemporary admirer,forced “human beings to renounce theirdesultory work habits.” In the late 1700s,fear of industrial piracy was so intense thatthe British refused to let cotton mill work-ers leave the country. But American en-trepreneurs eventually smuggled some se-crets out and, with the help of EliWhitney’s cotton gin (patented in 1794),launched a homegrown industry. The na-tion’s textile center of Lowell, Massachu-setts, hired thousands of New Englandfarm girls to work 14-hour days with littlerespite, and thereby planted the seeds ofthe labor movement.

Northern industrialists, dependent onSouthern slave labor for raw materials,were latecomers to the cause of abolition,but by the end of the 1850s, Yafa writes,many were “no longer willing to pay fortheir conscience with their cotton.” Fortheir part, many Southerners believed cot-ton exports would underwrite their ulti-mate independence. In the decades afterthe Civil War, farmers attempted to re-build the devastated Southern cottoneconomy, but they were stymied by low

Workers open cotton bales at North Carolina’s White Oak Mill inthe early 1900s—one of the few mill jobs available to blacks.