Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene (ISBN: 0199291152) explains the Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS) in terms of Game Theory.

He describes the give and take of numeric representation of possible sides of an genetic disposition, showing how some traits evolve to become dominant while others fall into an ESS where more than one side are represented in varying proportion.

Of particular interest is how this relates to lying, as a genetic trait:

Obviously, it is vitally important in the war of attrition that individuals should give no inkling of when they are going to give up. Anybody who betrayed, by the merest flicker of a whisker, that he was beginning to think of throwing in the sponge, would be a an instant disadvantage. If, say, whisker-flickering happened to be a reliable sign that retreat would follow within one minute, there would be a very simple strategy: ‘If your opponent’s whiskers flicker, wait one more minute, regardless of what your own previous plans for giving up might have been. If your opponent’s whiskers have not yet flickered, and you are within one minute of the time when you intend to give up anyway, give up immediately and don’t waste any more time. Never flicker your own whiskers.’ So natural selection would quickly penalize whisker-flickering and any analogous betrayals of future behaviour. The poker face would evolve.

Why the poker face rather than out-and-out lies? Once again, because lying is not stable. Suppose it happened to be the case that the majority of individuals raised their hackles only when they were truly intending to go on for a very long time in a war of attrition. The obvious counterploy would evolve: individuals would give up immediately when an opponent raised his hackles. But now, liars might start to evolve. Individuals who really had no intention of going on for a long time would raise their hackles on every occasion, and reap the benefits of easy and quick victory. So liar genes would spread. When liars became the majority, selection would not favour individuals who called their bluff. Therefore liars would decrease in numbers again. In the war of attrition, telling lies is no more evolutionarily stable than telling the truth. The poker face is evolutionarily stable. Surrender, when it finally comes, will be sudden and unpredictable.

The Selfish Gene is an excellent source for understanding why the altruistic society can never be. It also serves to point out the folly in generalizations, such as the ever-popular “why do men lie?”