A Biological Perspective on Understanding Misinformation

A recent scientific study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface notes that, while misinformation may feel like one of the defining challenges of the digital age, humans are far from the first or only organisms to grapple with misleading signals, false alarms, and deceptive communication.

A Natural History of Misinformation

This new study argues that misinformation permeates biological life at every scale, from bacteria and birds to the cells of the human immune system.

According to researchers from Cornell University, the study offers the very first systematic “natural history” of misinformation across the biological world and concludes that misinformation is not an evolutionary glitch or a modern pathology, but an unavoidable consequence of how organisms communicate.

By reviewing examples of socially transmitted misinformation across biological systems, the researchers found that the production, transmission, and use of misinformation are widespread across multiple levels of biological organization.

Rather than being a dysfunction, misinformation appears to stem from fundamental constraints inherent in biological communication systems and is part of their normal functioning.

The researchers argued that “there is a need for a more integrated theoretical and empirical science of misinformation in biology,” highlighting four key questions on how misinformation shapes ecological and evolutionary dynamics.

These findings reframe misinformation not as a uniquely human failing amplified by social media, but as a deeply rooted biological phenomenon, influencing everything from how bird flocks respond to perceived threats to how immune systems sometimes attack the bodies they are meant to protect.

The study further argues that socially transmitted misinformation is a “ubiquitous feature of biological communication,” and that “it should therefore be viewed as a fundamental part of social, ecological, and evolutionary systems, rather than as a pathology that somehow lies apart from the normal functioning of these systems.”

“In this light, we argue that there is a need to formalize the study of misinformation and its impacts on biological systems into a more integrated theoretical and empirical science,” the study report reads.

Biology and the Concept of Misinformation

The researchers describe misinformation as any signal, cue, or stimulus that causes a biological agent to form beliefs that diverge from the actual state of reality. They add that misinformation is socially transmitted when it originates from another biological agent (biological decision-making unit) and can spread serially when recipients react in ways that pass the message on to others, whether accurately or not.

Among birds, the study highlights serially transmitted misinformation through false alarm cascades in flocks. In these cases, an initiator emits an alarm call, a specialized vocalization normally used to signal real danger, even though no actual threat is present.

Meanwhile, other birds perceive the call and may respond by producing alarm calls themselves, thereby propagating the original misleading signal to additional members of the flock.

According to the study, socially transmitted misinformation can “pose a problem in biological systems because it interferes with an organism’s ability to tune its behaviour effectively to the state of the world around it.”

The researchers note that deception through misinformation is not limited to the deliberate creation of false signals. It can also occur when an agent interferes with socially transmitted signals in ways that alter how those signals are interpreted.

The study illustrates this part with the example of bacteria, emitting and detecting chemical signals to coordinate with others of the same species, a process known as “quorum sensing.”

“This widespread form of information exchange allows bacterial cells to respond to changes in the density of other cells in the environment by dynamically adjusting their behaviours.”

“Given this powerful communication system, one might expect that strategies have evolved to subvert ‘quorum sensing,’ and indeed, bacteria including Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium have evolved just such a strategy,” the study argues.

According to the findings, these species import signaling molecules used by other bacteria for the “quorum sensing,” altering their concentration in the surrounding environment. This disruption interferes with other species’ ability to accurately detect cell density, giving the deceptive strain a competitive advantage.

The study also shows that misinformation can disrupt processes within a single organism, particularly when the immune system makes errors, most notably by misidentifying host tissue as foreign and launching an attack against it.

Towards a Science of Biological Misinformation

In addition, the researchers developed a theoretical framework to categorize how misinformation arises in biological networks. In some cases, organisms are simply exposed to rare or ambiguous signals, a phenomenon the paper describes as being “misinformed by chance.”

According to this scientific study, misinformation arises from misinterpretation. Since organisms can only approximate how signals map onto real-world conditions, they rely on “heuristic decoding functions,” and when these heuristical rules are flawed or overly simplified, they can produce systematic errors.

The study also addresses a key question: why are socially transmitted messages so often misinformative? The findings suggest that as messages pass from one agent to another, there is “frequently a loss of context.” This loss occurs when transmitted signals omit critical details needed for accurate interpretation.

Within social groups, misinformation can be further amplified through feedback loops. The researchers explain how processes such as “collective distortion” and “multistability” can cause systems to settle into stable or incorrect states, in which large groups behave in ways entirely “uncorrelated with the true state of the environment.”

The researchers clarified that they are not suggesting all instances of misinformation transmission are equivalent, nor that insights from one species or system necessarily apply to others.

Meanwhile, research on controlling misinformation is rapidly expanding, and many strategies proposed for curbing misinformation online mirror broader mechanisms in biological systems, where misinformation can be suppressed, modified, created, or amplified. This process resembles a common tactic in human news media, where initially authentic messages are made misleading by removing or altering their context.

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