Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin

Having been buried by statistics courses in college, it has always amazed me how people build entire empires out of the slimmest of statistical information. Making judgments based purely on an 'mean' response is an invitation to the error of thinking that a change in average means a trend is developing, or that you are even likely to get an average response in any particular case. To be able to make an even educated guess one has to look at the mode, the median, and various statistical distributions. Even then, it's possible to be wrong, but at least you will have an excuse. This book by the late Stephen Gould is one of the best discussions of statistical fallacy I've ever seen. Gould starts out with the story of is confrontation with a form of cancer that is almost invariably fatal within a very short time period. Or rather, the modal life span after diagnosis is very short. Gould was a survivor, and his discussion of how the mode has very little to do with individual cases, and how that the studies are skewed by being left limited (there are no negative life expectancies) is enlightening. Having made his initial point, Gould elaborates it by turning to the disappearance of the .400 batting average. Because there is a lot more information about baseball than there is about a rare form of cancer, Gould is able to look at another form of statistical skew, where there may very well be an upper physical limit, and the field involves multiple variables (pitching, hitting, etc.). By the time he is done the reader will be confident that batting is doing fine, and ready for the real reason Gould wrote Full House - just who really is the boss of earth. From Victorian times onward one of the 'myths' we humans tell each other is that we are somehow the apex of evolution. That not only is progress (as expressed by intelligence and complexity) inevitable, but that it actually is progress. Using the same statistics that analyzed the .400 average, Gould explodes many of the misunderstandings about what evolution actually is. We are reminded that humans, in fact, all of the 'animal kingdom' are the tiniest part of life on the earth. The creatures with the most species, best ability to survive, and sheer numbers and weight, are the lowly bacteria. For some 3.4 billion years they have ruled the earth, and everything else has been their food. On top of finding out that we may very well be the last representatives of a dying genera, we must suffer with the fact that we have been beaten out by the most elementary of life forms. Gould reminds us that 'It is a gift to be simple,' writing in a style that is both entertaining and easily accessible. You may start out statistically disadvantaged, but by the end of 'Full House' you will have a much clearer picture of statistics and evolution. While Gould does not break any new territory in this book, he does take us on a wonderful tour of the real world.

After seeing that there were already some 40 or so reviews of this wonderful book, and having read it some years ago I was reluctant to add another. But, being a fan of Gould's magnificent "Wonderful Life" (1989) and seeing some negative, and misleading reviews of this particular book, I had to chime in. To begin with, Gould's books are highly readable and enjoyable as he has a great capacity to relate objective science to the subjective world. "Full House" will be challenging to you if you do not already understand or buy into Darwinism. If not, you'll definitely take issue with his seemingly harsh conclusions (i.e. "Humans are here by the luck of the draw, not the inevitability of life's direction or evolution's mechanism" p.175). The book is about diversity and "the spread of excellence" on earth. Consequently, it puts man in his place (just another organism amongst many, and quite minor compared to bacteria) amongst greater geologic history; and this can be a bit difficult to swallow at first. But read on! Utilizing baseball and the disappearance of .400 ave. hitting as one major example to illustrate the nature of evolution, Gould shows through statistics how one aspect of the game (hitting) has declined over time, while the rest (pitching & fielding) have increased in skill level. It all makes perfect sense. That's not to say one can't argue with him (although he's now dead), but Gould's contributions to evolutionary theory can be controversial to the unconverted - especially the religious (namely, Catholics & those with firmly held, comfortable beliefs in Manifest Desitiny). Gould (and most science) is directly opposed to this type of anthropocentric thinking; but not, however, traditional Deist beliefs in which God does not interfere with human evolution. In many regards, "Wonderful Life" and "Full House" comfortably fit into an older, more original Christianity - that of Gnosticism, in which the earth is a sort of abandoned proving ground. Gould conjectures: "...perhaps we are, whatever our glories and accomplishments, a momentary cosmic accident that would never rise again if the tree of life could be replanted from seed and regrown under similar conditions" p.18. The premiss of "Full House" is that "progress is, nonetheless, a delusion based on social prejudice and psychological hope engendered by our unwillingness to accept the plain (and true) meaning of the fourth Freudian revolution" p.20. Later on, Gould reiterates: "The vaunted progress of life is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus toward inherently advantageous complexity" p.173. He could be wrong. He could be right. He does however back up his ideas with plenty of observable proofs, experience (he was a paleontologist), and statistics - all in Gould's entertaining and thought-provoking signature style. The fact is, neither Gould nor Darwin nor Freud is saying a person ought to stop striving for excellence - in fact, they're encour

This book is a forceful illustration of some basic theorems presented by G.C. Williams in his book 'Adaptation and Natural selection': 'there is nothing in the basic structure of the theory of natural selection that would suggest the idea of any kind of cumulative progress' and 'Evolution was a by-product of the maintenance of adaptation'.Gould corroborates these theorems by showing that the main modus of life on this planet is and has always been 'bacterial'.He explains clearly that the second law of thermodynamics is only valid for closed systems, not for the earth.He stresses also that cultural changes are fundamentally different from Darwinian evolutions. The former are Lamarckian, the latter are forced by the less efficient process of natural selection.But Gould warns rightly that the enormous technological revolutions are not necessarily cultural or moral improvements because of the real risk of, e.g., environmental poisoning or a nuclear catastrophe.One needs a basic knowledge of statistics to fully understand the book.In his vigorous and persuasive style, S.J. Gould puts some good-looking scientific and moral ideas into a coffin.Not to be missed.

I like Gould's style. He is a scientist and not a philosopher. So many other books of this type present purely philosophical, or even worse religious, arguments which have nothing to do with reality (you can "prove" anything with pure logic if you make the correct initial assumptions). This sort of pap is an insult the reader's intelligence. Stephen Gould makes a compelling and logical argument which is supported by empirical evidence and not assumptions. Before reading this book I accepted the popular myth that evolution tends to produce complexity. This book has reduced my ignorance. I thought the link between baseball and evolution was clever. Gould is a master at finding connections between seemingly disparate subjects. I

Evolution and Genesis, are each other's most common adversaries with regards to the origi of mankind, however, there is another much more profound and believable explanation of our origins on this planet. Stephen Jay Gould, is Professor of zoology adn geology at Harvard University and the curator for invertebrate paleontology in the university's Museum of Comparative Zoology. Professor Gould compares and explains the decline of major league baseball batting averages to man's inevitable domination of the planet, as the, "spread of excellence". He continually contradicts misperceptions of millions in the belief of Darwin's, "Evolutions of the Species", and the Bible's theory of complexity are not characteristic of the evolution of life on Earth. As in his previous 15 books he vividly explains and supports his teachings and beliefs with biological and paleontological evidence. The Spread of Excellence, is the spreading out of expansion of complex organisms on this planet over a period of several billions of years. In a comparison of this spread of excellence to baseball, the significance of a decline in baseball hitting averages, since Ted William's 1940's 406 average, does not indicate a drop in performance or talent but represents an increase in talented players across the board. Dr. Gould is both a scientist and a writer extraordinaire. In a comparison of Full House tothe previously mentioned radical theories of the origin of mankind, Full House is but a natural extension or conclusion in reasoning and logical thinking in a complex world.