Roy Niles

The Strategic Intelligence of Trust: Life, an Evolutionary Force of Nature Roy Niles

This book will hopefully present a new understanding of life as an evolutionary force of nature. It's the author's philosophical look at some of the latest science where our biological evolution is concerned. But in particular, it focuses on a new hypothesis where trust, and its functional counterpart, deception, have been proposed as the primary intelligent and causative functions of all life on earth. And not just as life's behavioral tactics, but as its most necessary strategic traits. Without which, life as we know it could not have evolved at all. With over 40 years of experience as a professional investigator of human foibles, he provides support for a number of relatively new ideas that concern the way we, and other life forms, have used these strategies over the last few billion years to both acquire and serve an extremely odd diversity of purposes. The reader should be aware, however, that these central themes won't sit well with either the Creationists or the staunch devotees of neo-Darwinian selection theories. Particularly since the author hopes to further demonstrate that all evolution is the proximate result of the entity involved reacting strategically to its experience. And that all of the above are acting in concurrence with this quote from Charles Sanders Peirce: "In the pragmatic way of thinking in terms of conceivable practical implications, every thing has a purpose, and its purpose is the first thing that we should try to note about it." If you can handle that, you should want to read this book. If you can't, perhaps you shouldn't.