Product Description

Few would question the truism that humankind is the crowning achievement of evolution; that the defining thrust of life's history yields progress over time from the primitive and simple to the more advanced and complex; that the disappearance of .400 hitting in baseball is a fact to be bemoaned; or that identifying an existing trend can be helpful in making important life decisions. Few, that is, except Stephen Jay Gould who, in his new book Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, proves that all of these intuitive truths are, in fact, wrong.

"All of these mistaken beliefs arise out of the same analytical flaw in our reasoning, our Platonic tendency to reduce a broad spectrum to a single, pinpointed essence," says Gould. "This way of thinking allows us to confirm our most ingrained biases that humans are the supreme being on this planet; that all things are inherently driven to become more complex; and that almost any subject can be expressed and understood in terms of an average."

In Full House, Gould shows why a more accurate way of understanding our world (and the history of life) is to look at a given subject within its own context, to see it as a part of a spectrum of variation rather than as an isolated "thing" and then to reconceptualize trends as expansion or contraction of this "full house" of variation, and not as the progress or degeneration of an average value, or single thing. When approached in such a way, the disappearance of .400 hitting becomes a cause for celebration, signaling not a decline in greatness but instead an improvement in the overall level of play in baseball; trends become subject to suspicion, and too often, only a tool of those seeking to advance a particular agenda; and the "Age of Man" (a claim rooted in hubris, not in fact) more accurately becomes the "Age of Bacteria."

"The traditional mode of thinking has led us to draw many conclusions that don't make satisfying sense," says Gould. "It tells us that .400 hitting has disappeared because batters have gotten worse, but how can that be true when record performances have improved in almost any athletic activity?" In a personal eureka!, Gould realized that we were looking at the picture backward, and that a simple conceptual inversion would resolve a number of the paradoxes of the conventional view.

While Full House deftly reveals the shortcomings of the popular reasoning we apply to everyday life situations, Gould also explores his beloved realm of natural history as well. Whether debunking the myth of the successful evolution of the horse (he grants that the story still deserves distinction, but as the icon of evolutionary failure); presenting evidence that the vaunted "progress of life" is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus toward complexity; or relegating the kingdoms of Animalai and Plantae to their proper positions on the genealogical chart for all of life (as mere twigs on one of the three bushes), Full House asks nothing less than that we reconceptualize our view of life in a fundamental way.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #80316 in Books
• Published on: 1997-09-16
• Released on: 1997-09-16
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 244 pages

Amazon.com
The human mind has a trusty device for simplifying a complex world: reduce to averages and identify trends. Although valuable, the risk is that we ignore variations and end up with a skewed view of reality. In evolutionary terms, the result is a view in which humans are the inevitable pinnacle of evolutionary progress, instead of, as Stephen Jay Gould patiently argues, "a cosmic accident that would never arise again if the tree of life could be replanted." The implications of Gould's argument may threaten certain of our philosophical and religious foundations but will in the end provide us with a clearer view of, and a greater appreciation for, the complexities of our world.

From Library Journal
In his first single-subject book of original writing since Wonderful Life (LJ 9/1/89), Harvard paleontologist Gould examines trends in natural variation throughout organic evolution, thereby discrediting the abstract ideas of eternal forms, fixed essences, and intrinsic progress. His insightful study even applies to sports systems, accounting for the apparent extinction of .400 hitting in baseball. In light of fossil evidence and overwhelming biodiversity, he concludes that there is no linear pattern or ultimate design to evolution. Instead, life is a spreading web or a branching bush; variation, rather than progression, is nature's expression of excellence. Consequently, our species is not the inevitable end-goal of evolution. It remains for Gould to consider in his next book the ethical and theological implications of his nonprogressive and naturalistic world view. (Are bacteria really as important as human beings?) Gould's book is rather a dense read for the average patron, but his ideas are important. Recommended for all academic and public library science collections.
-?H. James Birx, Canisius Coll., Buffalo, N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

New York Times, David Papineau
This volume may ultimately be less substantial than his previous books, but a potboiler by Mr. Gould is still worth 10 books by most other science writers.

Customer Reviews

Wonderful concept - (somewhat) difficult to read
Well....
Gould's message is pure, and correct. We take complexity as a trend ("thing") that is presumably advancing with time, rather than recognizing it as a part of the Full House where there are right or left limitations, etc etc etc... (you can read the book:)

But from a critique point of view, Gould takes his basic concepts and...sort of...picks complicated forums to explain them, for the average reader.
I mean, I hate to say it, but the book could have been one-quarter to one-third shorter than it was, to say what it does...

I accept his conclusions, and I love his work and his contributions to American science and education. Gould was a great guy and a well-needed popularizer of science. But this book is a bit tedious for the lay-reader who has other things to do every day. Its too long - but for those that can tackle it, its an eye opener !

Much better than Taleb and Mandelbrot
This book is about how to analyze data. It is the clearest and best written book on the subject I have read so far. Other well known books on the subject include Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Taleb and The Misbehavior of Markets A New Kind of Science by Mandelbrot. Although all these authors are brilliant and their respective books have their merits, Stephen Jay Gould's book is much clearer. While Taleb and Mandelbrot obsess about the flaws of the normal distribution assumption underlying investment theory, they both struggle in offering pragmatic alternatives. Gould instead studies the shape of the entire distribution that he calls the "Full House" and remains comfortable within a traditional statistical framework without building any castle of cards (referring to Mandelbrot fractal geometry).

Gould takes you on a really entertaining quantitative learning expedition by following three separate themes: 1) the disappearance of the 0.400 baseball hitter, 2) his run in with a deadly disease, and 3) the theory of evolution. These themes allow him to flesh out his analytical skills and share with you concepts that are often counterintuitive and occasionally revolutionary.

In his struggle with a deadly disease he illustrates how the median outcome (only 8 months to live) did not worry him much. What mattered to him after studying the related data was the skewness of the distribution with a long right-hand tail (meaning many survivors with normal remaining life span unaffected by the disease). He then studied what were the characteristics of these long term survivors (age, overall health, etc...). He noted he did share these characteristics and sure enough he survived this disease just fine. In his case, the median outcome was irrelevant. It was not his most likely outcome. Within this chapter he also introduces the concept of walls or limits. Many distributions have a left wall as figures can't be negative for many variables including stock prices, income level, and survivors' lifespan. For Gould, `walls' are key because they dictate that the distribution can expand in only the opposite direction.

When he moves on to the disappearance of the 0.400 hitter, Gould shows that the distribution of hitters butts against a right wall (upper limit of human achievement). He observed that the average hitting percentage has not changed much over time. But, the best hitters percentages has declined. Yet, he makes a case that today's hitters are better than the 0.400 hitters of yesteryears. What happened is that all positions improved commensurately (fielders, pitchers). So, the 0.400 stat is not an absolute but a relative measure of when batters outsmarted the other positions. He comes up with this perplexing theorem: "as play improves and bell curves march towards the right wall, variation must shrink at the right tail. The worst players got much better, and so did everybody else. But, the best players margin of relative superiority has consequently shrunk. He measured this phenomena by observing the steady decline of the standard deviation of batting average over the past century. And, indeed it declined steadily. So, in this closed system an improvement in performance was not marked by a rising average, but by a decline in standard deviation. The graphs on page 119 illustrate this complex concept very clearly.

Next, Gould moves on where he left a legacy as a leading evolutionary biologist: the theory evolution. Contrary to what we think the theory of evolution was misnamed. Darwin wanted to use the terms "descent with modification" instead of "evolution." Gould states Darwin referred to "evolution" because he succumbed to the cultural pressure of his era. The latter was obsessed with progress and the superiority of mankind. Gould strongly suggests that Darwin's original phrasing was more accurate. Gould goes on explaining that the animal kingdom history is captured by a right-hand skewed distribution that buts against a left wall of minimal complexity: the bacteria. An animal organism can not be less complex than that. With random mutation managed by natural selection, some species can only become more complex (not less so). Yet, this is not evolution. Bacteria still dominate the animal kingdom. They are more adaptable, more prevalent, more indestructible than any other animal organism. They are the only ones who would survive a nuclear holocaust and who can live in outer space. The process of complexity is somewhat random. Stephen Wolfram had reached the same conclusion in his very strange book, A New Kind of Science where he suggested that evolution was not so evolutionary but random (and replicable through cellular automata processes). Thanks to Gould, I now realize that Darwin and Wolfram pretty much agreed.

In the last chapter, Gould addresses if human culture is butting now against a right-hand wall of human potential. He thinks that is not so much the case in the sciences where he feels we have much more to figure out. But, he feels it is the case in the arts. Will we ever get another Beethoven? Another Shakespeare? Or another Michelangelo? Most probably not. Charles Murray studying the same subject in his excellent Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 reached pretty much the same conclusion.

No bias in evolution towards greater complexity - explained
Does evolution have a tendency to make more and more complex organisms? Most of us would give a confident yes answer to this question; however this book convinces its readers that no such tendency exists. Gould sets out to prove that since evolution works by local adaptation, organisms can evolve to be less or more complex, according to the environment's needs. This is also recognized by Darwin; however Darwin contemplates a drive towards greater complexity which would arise as a result of biotic competition: When one organism evolves to be more complex, the other should be even more complex in order to displace the former. This is famously illustrated in the wedge metaphor in the Origin of Species. The argument of Darwin makes rational sense. What I liked about this book is that Gould does not argue against this notion, but instead makes a number of predictions that would allow him to differentiate between driven (towards more complexity) and passive evolution. Using empirical data, and a number of definitions of complexity (such as size, nervous system, or fractal dimensions of ammonites) he shows that scientific data supports passive evolution.
However, this book is way too long to tell this story. Gould intentionally builds his case very slowly, which by the way makes a very amusing read, maybe except the parts which are almost a eulogy for the bacterial kingdoms. I believe one could easily understand the whole idea of the book by just reading chapter 12 and looking at figure 29. This idea, albeit simple to grasp in hindsight, is not straightforward to imagine (like all real good ideas), and since it gives a way to think of evolution in broader terms.
Idea is as follows:
There is a left wall of complexity for being alive.
Organisms evolve to higher or lower complexity with no inherent bias toward neither. Since there is a left wall, they can't be simpler than a certain level, however the right wall is open, so the highest complexity attained by organisms increases.
The overall shape and mode of complexity distribution doesn't change.