“Millions of years back there must have been some adaptive advantage to knowing that what was communicated was true,” Scile said to me, last time we’d hypothesised this history. “Selection for a mind that could only express that.” “The evolution of trust …” I started to say. “There’s no need for trust, this way,” he interrupted. Chance, struggle, failure, survival, a Darwinian chaos of instinctive grammar, the drives of a big-brained animal in a hard environment, the selection out of traits, had made a race of pure truth-tellers. “This language is miraculous,” Scile had said. I was somehow repulsed by it, in fact. It was astonishing, given what language needs to do, that the Ariekei had survived.
(..)
“We’re insane, to them: we tell the truth with lies.”

//China Miéville, Embassytown