If the first major biological invention was communication, the very next was the lie. Lies are everywhere; from the harmless flies who imitate stinging wasps, to the forgers and confidence tricksters of human crime. One defence is to make the truth too costly or difficult to imitate. A big male toad can exploit his large resonant volume to make a deep, seductive croak, which a smaller, less desirable male cannot imitate. Similarly, a dominant communicator such as Nature can command belief by the costly presses and editorial staff needed for a printed journal. A lone scientific crank cannot afford such conspicuous authority.

But cheap electronic communication is changing all this. Any nerd with a modem and computer can have his own Web site, as seemingly authoritative as Nature's own. Furthermore, computers simply invite mischief-makers, as proved by the hacking and computer-virus industries. Already the Internet is dense with lies and nonsense. On tomorrow's information superhighway, says Daedalus, all the frauds and deceptions which can be spread, will be spread. Tricksters will infiltrate and subvert all communications. They may falsify the Nature Web site, or copy it, insert some mad paper of their own, and present the result as a Nature mirror site. With old-fashioned print a distant memory, how will Nature, or anyone else, retain their integrity? If they cannot, nobody in the glorious electronic future will have any reason to believe anything they read.

In this connection, Daedalus recalls the self-referential problem of writing a true sentence of the form, ‘This sentence contains eighteen ‘a's, five ‘b's …’ and on down the alphabet. It is almost impossible, because the letters in the names of the numbers are also part of the task. So, says Daedalus, let every electronic issue of Nature contain a sentence giving its total alphabetic count, including the letters in the check sentence itself. Nature will need a vastly expensive supercomputer to work it out in the one week available for each issue. Any reader will be able to validate the count. But the smallest change will wreck it, and no forger could afford the computer time to derive a new matching correct sentence.

This strategy will restore credibility to dominant, respectable publishers with reputations to defend, even in the coming electronic age. The mass of little forgers and liars waiting to infest the information superhighway will be frustrated. Only big, rich liars will survive; and we're used to them already.