Misinformation is an inevitable biological reality across nature

https://phys.org/news/2025-12-misinformation-inevitable-biological-reality-nature.html

by Brajeshwar • 7 months ago

3 3 7 months ago

This claim that misinformation is an "inevitable biological reality" is jarring because it means lying isn't just a modern political problem or a moral failing—it's an ancient survival tactic used across nature. If our brains are wired to both deceive and be fooled, we can't just rely on fact-checkers to fix things; the real solution has to be teaching people to build a stronger mental defense against it.

DaveZale• 7 months ago

It's very harsh to learn this after earning a couple science degrees and working in analytical and research environments where little "bullshitting" is done, although obviously those doing the selling, getting funding, seeking to get hired or promoted, can't avoid some degree of self-promotion as a necessary evil. But now, shameless self promotion and deception tends to be the rule, especially in online marketing, political posturing... we all know it very well now. Anything to get more eyeballs on the screen, better metrics. Of course we were all raised on television advertising, and now we are dealing with an obesity crisis due to heavily promoted junk food, so now, very expensive weight loss drugs are promoted heavily. First some ads make us sick, then others come to our rescue, in that perspective. What Charles Hugh Smith calls, burning the village to save the village. Downvote away, it won't hurt me a bit.

realitydrift• 7 months ago

This paper helped clarify something I’ve been struggling to articulate. Misinformation isn’t a pathology layered on top of communication systems, it’s an inevitable consequence of finite bandwidth, lossy encoding, and imperfect decoding. Once you frame misinformation as negative information gain, a lot of modern discourse failures stop looking moral or adversarial and start looking thermodynamic.

What we’re seeing at scale feels less like people believing false things and more like fidelity collapse under entropy. Loss of context, message mutation, and collective distortion compounding faster than belief updating mechanisms can correct. In that sense, drift is the default trajectory of any dense social information network unless energy is continuously spent maintaining alignment with reality.

The uncomfortable implication is that better fact-checking alone won’t fix this. You’d need systems that actively preserve semantic fidelity across transmission, not just truth at the source, which biology seems to manage only intermittently and at real cost

Misinformation is an inevitable biological reality across nature

Related Stories